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DYNAMIC IDEALISM 



Relationship among things is the criterion nei- 
ther of a life nor of a mind that exists apart from 
the substance of the universe. It is, however, the 
criterion of substance itself, and as the central truth 
about things it bears this witness : The universe 
itself lives ; the universe itself thinks. 



DYNAMIC IDEALISM 

AN ELEMENTARY COURSE 

IN THE 

METAPHYSICS OF PSYCHOLOGY 



FIRST ENTERED UPON IN LECTURES BEFORE 

STUDENTS IN PHILOSOPHY AT THE 

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 




BY 



ALFRED H. LLOYD, Ph.D 



AUTHOR OF "CITIZENSHIP AND SALVATION" 





CHICAGO 

A. C McCLURG AND COMPANY 

1898 



ED 












*><-\A.i\ 



Copyright 
By A. C. McClurg and Co. 

A.D. l8q8 



PREFACE. 



THE following chapters, as has been indi- 
cated on the titlepage, are made up from 
material used in a university lecture-room, but 
the impulse to put the substance of the lectures 
into the form of a book really came from another 
source. A year ago I gave six lectures upon 
subjects from psychology, before the Twentieth 
Century Club of Detroit; and the certain diffi- 
culties as well as the apparent successes that I 
met with in those lectures led me into the writ- 
ing of this book. 

Accordingly, throughout the ensuing pages I 
have had in mind, as my possible readers, those 
who are not strictly technical students in psy- 
chology, and on their account I have tried to 
avoid the more serious technicalities. The sub- 
ject, however, is a deep one, and it deepens as 
it goes. So let me confess here that, while 
always courting both brevity and simplicity and 
often using extremely popular and large-written 
illustrations, I have not always refrained from 



vi PREFACE. 

saying, as occasion has offered, even what has 
seemed likely to be of interest only to psycho- 
logical specialists. 

My standpoint is also indicated on the title- 
page, at least in part. Not only am I heartily 
in sympathy with such thinkers to-day as insist 
that psychology without metaphysics is useless, 
if not absurd, but also I go to the extent of 
believing that real psychology is metaphysics. 
I have, therefore, whenever considering a psy- 
chological theory, been more interested in its 
relation to Dualism or to Monism — that is to 
say, in its metaphysical implications — than in 
any of its mere external details. For example, 
the physiological or the paidological statement of 
any fact or process, or the abstract statement 
from any other field of inquiry, has always 
seemed to me to be subordinate to the meta- 
physical principle. Only the metaphysical prin- 
ciple can make any fact or any process really 
concrete. 

And, finally, in special illustration of my pre- 
dilection for metaphysics, I may say that I have 
felt that the first duty of psychology was to give 
a distinct, explicit doctrine of the soul. Psy- 
chology must not and cannot tarry any longer 
at either the body or the mind alone, nor even 
at both together. " Science of the soul," the 



PREFACE. vii 

old-fashioned definition, which has been scorned 
or discreetly neglected by modern rationalism, 
is, after all, the true definition. Perhaps, how- 
ever, the scorn has meant only the passing of a 
certain idea of the soul ; and in recognition of 
such a possibility I have usually employed the 
more general term, " self," for the soul-reality. 
Surely there is a soul-reality, whether there be 
a " soul " or not. 

A. H. L. 

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 
November, 1897. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction " 



part i. 

THE WORLD OF THINGS. 

HAPTER 

I. Part and Whole 35 

II. Change 48 

III. Organism 54 

IV. The Body 59 

V. The Outer World 75 

VI. The Two-faced Object, or Language . . 87 



part 11. 

THE WORLD OF IDEAS. 



VII. Ideas as Forms 



97 



VIII. Historical Illustration 107 

IX. Ideas not Forms but Forces m 

X. Illustrations from Education 123 

XI. Body, Mind, Soul 129 

XII. Time I47 

XIII. A Summary: Dynamic vs. Formal Idealism 158 

XIV. Consciousness as Interest 166 

XV. Thought and Language 178 



CONTENTS. 

part in. 

THE WORLD OF ACTS. 



PAGE 



CHAPTER 

XVI. Reaction or Interaction? 197 

XVII. Will 2 °9 

XVIII. The Living Ideal .219 



Appendix: A Study of Immortality in Outline 227 
Index 2 45 



DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 



INTRODUCTION. 

PSYCHOLOGY, the special science through 
which in this book an entrance is to be 
made into the field of philosophy, has been 
defined in many ways, but the best definition, 
or at least the best introductory definition, runs 
as follows : Psychology is science of the soul. 

A science is a classification of facts, or of 
what are supposed to be facts. It is organized 
knowledge. The classification of facts, how- 
ever, or the organization of knowledge, is hardly 
aimless. Science does not by any means end 
with itself, is never only for science's sake. Men 
have often appeared to think that science as a 
body of knowledge was its own end, but obvi- 
ously to think so for long is quite impossible. 
Science leads to something. 

It is accordingly well worth while to recognize 
at the start the end or aim of science. Thus, any 
particular science is a body of knowledge which 



12 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

defines — that is, which relates and co-ordi- 
nates — the incidents or conditions of some pro- 
cess or activity. Physics defines the conditions 
of a so-called physical process, such as heat or 
light or electricity; biology, those of what we 
call organic growth; ethics, those of personal 
conduct in society: and the process or the 
activity, the incidents of whose expression are 
defined in a science, is the end of the science 
itself. 

But although in general the end of a science 
is some process or activity, an important dis- 
tinction has to be made. Some sciences have 
for their end an activity which belongs, or seems 
for a time to belong, to a sphere quite apart 
from the scientist, while others would free the 
activity of the scientist himself. The former 
are called objective or, in the more general use 
of the term, physical ; the latter, subjective. The 
former seek an answer to the question, How 
does the world about us act? the latter to the 
question, How do we, and so how can we, act? 
Psychology, most properly regarded, is the sub- 
jective science. 

Still, objective science and subjective science 
are related in a way very important to remark. 
Thus psychology cannot but be the centre of all 
science. The statement was made above that 



INTR OD UC TION. 1 3 

the objective sciences were interested in the 
expression of activities that belonged, or for a 
time seemed to belong, to a sphere quite apart 
from the scientist ; but every one must recognize 
that the activities are never really apart. Sooner 
or later an objective science comes to be applied, 
and with the application the scientist makes the 
activity, that had seemed so apart from him, his 
own. The so-called application of science al- 
ways realizes an identity of physical process and 
personal activity. It shows man finding his own 
life in the world's life. So, to repeat, because 
objective sciences are concerned with processes 
or activities that in point of fact are not external 
but are destined in time to belong to the self, 
they are themselves as to their centre subjective 
or psychological. 

Another definition of psychology now pre- 
sents itself, — a definition which in the first place 
recognizes that the natural aim of the science 
is an activity, and, in the second place, makes 
all the physical sciences also psychological. 
Instead of saying simply that psychology is sci- 
ence of the soul, we have now to say, Psychol- 
ogy is science of self-expression. This definition 
makes psychology more than mere abstract 
knowledge, since it gives to knowledge a real 
motive-power ; and it precludes any separation of 



14 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the self and the world, since the expressed self is 
always the self identified in activity with the world, 
or, in a commoner phrase, adjusted to the world. 
But, again, psychology is the body of knowledge 
that so defines the conditions of the life of the 
self as to liberate the self's activity. As has been 
said, it answers the question, How does man, 
and therefore how can man, express himself? It 
is not, as many have tried to make it, a merely 
ontological science ; nor is it a merely epis- 
temological science : it is distinctly a biological 
science. It is not interested in the self only as 
being, in the self as a substantially and inde- 
pendently existing soul ; nor yet in the self only 
as knowing, in the self as mere mind: it is 
interested in the self as living and doing. 
Clearly the self as doing both is and knows. 

The purely ontological psychology has long 
been dismissed from a truly responsible philos- 
ophy, but the epistemological psychology, which 
assumes that knowledge or consciousness in 
general is somehow a distinct and separate 
state of the self, and accordingly a state to be 
explained wholly within itself, still holds sway 
over thinkers of the day. The former belonged 
to a time when theology was the predominating 
interest, a world quite aloof from this being 
supposed to be both the source and the goal 



INTRODUCTION. 1 5 

of mankind ; and the latter, resulting from the 
reaction that set in so strongly toward the close 
of the eighteenth century, has belonged to a 
time given over to naturalism, to rationalism, 
to knowledge for knowledge's sake, to con- 
sciousness as something to be sought and cher- 
ished solely for its own clearness. But a new 
interest has already asserted itself in our time, 
an interest in expression or fulfilment instead 
of in mere being or in mere knowing; and in 
obedience to this interest psychology has been 
finally defined here, not ontologically as science 
of the soul, nor epistemologically as science of 
mind or of the self's sentient or conscious life, 
but biologically as science of self-expression or 
self- adjustment. The self as doing, as in ex- 
pression, be it said once more, both is and 
knows. Action fulfils soul and mind as not 
two but one. 

It goes almost without saying that the new 
interest of the present time carries with it a new 
idea of the soul itself. Were one to ask a 
number of persons what the soul or self is, the 
answers would be many. Some of them, too, 
would be very vague, as, for example, that the 
soul was life, or the body, or God in us, or unity, 
or the absolutely commonplace. But answers 
that were clear and at all definite, and that were 






1 6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

born of any insight into the spirit of the present 
time, would show a remarkable sympathy with 
that old-time thinker Aristotle. Aristotle, also 
living when man's life had reached or at least 
was approaching a culminating period, a mo- 
ment of fulfilment, regarded the soul as a func- 
tion of something. For him, as for us to-day, 
the soul was the fulfilment of the world, the 
perfection of the body. An " entelechy " he 
called it. As the pianist is the perfection of his 
piano, having quite within himself just the 
nature that the piano requires for the realization 
of the end to which it is a means ; as the me- 
chanic is the fulfilment of his peculiar tools and 
materials, being, so to speak, a sort of walking 
embodiment of his special environment, being 
the very activity that expresses the nature or 
meaning of his environment; so, in general, the 
soul is the perfection or fulfilment of the world, 
the self is the entelechy of the body. Wholly 
in accord with Aristotle are such timely ac- 
counts of the self as that it is an animated expe- 
rience, a responsible agent, a defined but liberated 
force. The pianist or the mechanic or the 
philanthropist is describable in any one of 
these ways. The walking-stick or the walking- 
leaf, in its embodiment and expression of the 
conditions of its life, conspicuously illustrates 



INTRO D UCTION. 1 7 

what modern thought finds in Aristotle's idea, 
being nothing more nor less than the soul of its 
peculiar surroundings. 

So the soul or self to-day is not some entity, 
spiritual in character in the sense of being 
altogether immaterial, but an intimate function 
of the world in which it finds itself. The self 
is both in and of the world, responsible to the 
world and dependent upon it. Psychology is 
science of the expression of a self that does but 
show forth in its acts the meaning of the world, 
the inner truth of the natural universe. In 
short, the world's activity — that is the self, that 
is the soul. 

But, furthermore, there is the fact of con- 
sciousness. The self not only is, but also is 
conscious. Indeed, at least for psychology, 
consciousness is the self's chief characteristic, 
although, as must be kept in mind, not the 
only characteristic or not an isolated character- 
istic. Consciousness certainly does not inhere 
in mind as a separate part of the self, but is 
vitally incident, is essential in the activity of the 
self as a whole. Just as in physical science we 
should not separate the phenomenon of friction 
from that of motion, so in psychology we 
should not separate the selfs consciousness 
from the self's activity. Indeed, if one under- 



1 8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

stands friction forwhatit really is, consciousness 
might itself be styled a form of friction, since it 
is born with the tension of self-expression. 

Recent science, whether as psychology or as 
biology, has concluded that life and conscious- 
ness are coextensive, that where one is the 
other must be also. This conclusion has been 
reached with much reluctance, since the neces- 
sities of thought have not been verified with 
perfect satisfaction to all in the outer world ; but 
it is self-evident that in an outer world such a 
conclusion never could be verified. Uncon- 
sciousness is a natural predicate of anything 
external. As Romanes has put the matter, 
however, the criteria of life and the criteria of 
consciousness are identical, and they must be 
so. Of the two each one must presuppose the 
other. Thus, in simple phrases, life can be 
present only where there is capacity of a self- 
interested response to an outer stimulus, that is, 
only where the stimulus to an action answers 
to some already developed motive or " func- 
tional tendency; " and consciousness is but the 
apprehension of, or the interest in, such a stimu- 
lus. Without consciousness life is impossible. 

The common view that consciousness is 
something added at a certain time to the 
altogether separate condition of life, at the time, 



INTRODUCTION. 1 9 

say, of the transition from plant to animal life, 
may satisfy those who limit consciousness to 
certain forms of experience, but it is very far 
from satisfying the reflective thinkers who seek 
the general principle of life to which the mere 
fact of consciousness as such must testify. It 
may serve a short-sighted classification to say 
that plants only live, while animals are also 
conscious, but it shuts wholly from view both 
what life really is and what consciousness really 
is. Nothing ever is what any particular form, or 
group of forms, of its expression would seem to 
have it. And the case in hand grows only the 
more difficult when the peculiar self-conscious- 
ness of man is put on trial. Plants live, it is said ; 
animals are also conscious, although only pas- 
sively so ; but men think, being self-conscious, 
actively conscious, constructively and relation- 
ally conscious. Yet such distinctions, while 
not without meaning, can only rather hinder 
than help the understanding. If it is true that 
wherever there is life there is consciousness, it 
is also true that wherever there is consciousness 
there is thought. What is thought in its 
simplest nature but the use of consciousness for 
some act of adjustment? In all life, however, 
even in the very lowest, such a use is manifest. 
A passive consciousness, a consciousness that is 



20 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

not seeking adjustment, is a contradiction of 
terms that can be matched only by an uncon- 
scious life. Yes, if we will but interest ourselves 
in principles, freeing our minds for a time from 
the notions of ordinary life, we can say to 
ourselves with conviction that even plants are 
conscious and that the very animals think. 

The true thinker must of course always pass 
quite beyond the understanding of ordinary life. 
He cannot use terms as he finds them used 
about him. In fact, in a very real sense his 
duty is to use them differently, that is, more 
deeply and more widely, with reference to their 
underlying meanings instead of to their obvious 
or superficial applications. " True," he may, 
for example, say to his fellows, " you and I are 
conscious, and we are alive, and we think withal, 
but quite apart from our life and our conscious- 
ness in themselves what are these things that 
we possess? What is thought? What is con- 
sciousness? What is life itself?" And then 
he gets an answer to his questions which dis- 
closes the very things into whose nature he has 
inquired in places where formerly he had been 
sure they were not. In general, merely to 
think is to find the identity of a thing and its 
negative; and this one needs always to remem- 
ber when the conclusions of science seem hos- 



IN TROD UCTION. 2 1 

tile to cherished preconceptions. Hostility is 
itself no evidence of truth, but also it is very- 
far from being a mark of error. A deep-think- 
ing science must always shock one's settled 
views, but so at first must any brighter light 
dazzle if it does not wholly blind the eyes. 
New light always begins by being a greater 
darkness. The thinker himself finds his new 
thought at once true and unreal. So, again, 
even plants are conscious and the very animals 
think; but not for such of us as live the passive 
thoughtless life of plants and animals, only for 
those among us who think too. In pages to 
follow the coextensiveness and inseparableness, 
indeed, the virtual identity of life and conscious- 
ness and thought, will be an important interest. 
Now, consciousness is of something, it has 
an object; and a preliminary view of the object 
of consciousness is desirable. In general, the 
object is the conscious self's environment, being 
that of which the self is the fulfilment and em- 
bodiment. In a very real sense the object is 
only the self or subject over again. In the sin- 
gle case of man, whose objective environment 
is the world of the sensuous qualities, — colors, 
tastes, smells, sounds, and the like, — the identity 
of subject and object is apparent enough. Man 
must say of the object's qualities that they are 



22 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

rather his states than its peculiar properties. In 
them he does but become aware of himself. 
Even at the moment when he ascribes them to 
the not-self he finds their identity with the self. 
The red rose a dozen feet away is red and dis- 
tant to his peculiar eye and according to his 
effort, implied if not expressed, to reach it. 
The quality of any sort in his outer world can 
interest and stimulate him only if it answer to 
some motive that is already his. In its sensu- 
ous quality, in its spatial character, even in the 
material nature whereby it has substantiality, it 
is he or his, being related to him or of his na- 
ture, and real only as he is real, changing as he 
changes, its structure or order only reflecting 
his organization, and its law being only the 
measure of his power. We study human his- 
tory in the languages and institutions and monu- 
ments of all sorts that have risen in the wake of 
man's progress, but languages and institutions 
and monuments are only the peculiar environ- 
ment, or object, of what we know as historic 
man. Psychology sees not a different object, 
but the same object in its more general charac- 
ters, in the characters which record a deeper 
and a longer history. The whole outer world, 
as we have it now about us, in all its wonderful 
nature and with all its lawfulness, has also risen 



INTRODUCTION. 2$ 

in the wake of the progress of man, or, let us 
say, in order to be quite broad and inclusive, in 
the wake of intelligent life as a whole ; and 
even as languages and monuments, as if an 
outer counterpart or even a " negative " of his 
nature, are but man over again, so the outer 
world, in those most general characteristics to 
which the psychologist looks, is man too. 
What seems not-self is only the reverse of self. 

But this is not all that is to be said of the 
object of consciousness, even in an introductory 
chapter. This alone would be sure to be mis- 
understood. The object of consciousness carries 
with it larger implications than what has been 
already indicated. Thus it is a common experi- 
ence among us, when we see or feel anything 
without, when belief in a reality in any sense 
beyond or external seizes upon us, in the first 
place to feel a more or less definite responsi- 
bility to a more far-reaching life than our own, 
and in the second place to get a sense of com- 
panionship in that responsibility with other 
living creatures ; and this common experience 
only bears witness to a general principle. 
Larger responsibility, and that a shared or a 
social responsibility, is an essential implication 
of objectivity in general ; and being this it must 
serve as a means to further interpretation of 



24 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

that identity of self and not-self which has 
been referred to. The not-self will prove 
to be fundamentally social in its nature, com- 
prising only other aspects of the same reality 
of which the self is but one. Even as in human 
history the external or objective institutions of 
human life have always served a social as well 
as a merely natural life, — and the one of these, 
in fact, in the other, — so the object of man's 
consciousness, or of any consciousness, is more 
than mere object, being incident to and accord- 
ingly always indicative of a social life. Simply 
this: There is no not-self that does not itself 
comprise other selves. The not-self, or object, 
of the hand as self, is the life of the whole body ; 
but for the hand the life of the whole body 
is a social, not a merely natural or physical 
life : and, similarly, for the individual man the 
life of the outer world must be social. Ordinary 
historians and politicians hardly go so far as 
to recognize in matter or physical substance 
a social institution, — they reserve the term for 
church and state and school and the like ; but 
the philosopher, examining human experience 
at its greatest depths and in its most general 
aspects, can see material substance in no other 
light. The philosopher finds in matter as not- 
self rather a principle or a relation than a 



INTRO D UC TION. 2 5 

distinct substance ; a pure principle, be it said 
quite abstractly, of sociality. So, again, — and 
this is a very important point for psychology, 
— not-self means other selves ; or, rather, it 
means a system or organism of selves. 

Psychology has far too often neglected the 
sociality, the social life, intrinsic to the very 
consciousness of an object. Psychology has 
failed to see that sociality, not distinct substan- 
tiality, is the essence of objectivity. To fail 
in this way, however, to neglect so important 
an implication of consciousness, is to miss 
almost the richest truth about consciousness 
and its object. Psychology, then, is not natur- 
ally individualistic. On the contrary, psychol- 
ogy is naturally socialistic. As hinted before, 
men have recognized, although, on the whole, 
unreflectively, that responsibility to nature was 
social or shared. Again and again it has been 
proclaimed that man is a part of nature, being 
but one expression among indefinite other re- 
lated expressions of her life. Psychology, how- 
ever, greatly deepens this popular notion, when 
it makes consciousness, which is coextensive 
with life, an essentially social phenomenon. The 
human organism's environment, or for that 
matter any organism's environment, if not 
always social to the individual self as a whole, 



26 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

is so, at some point in the division, to the self's 
parts. Thus, to put the case somewhat roughly, 
although one man may not always find other 
men in his objective world, yet he will find 
other hands or legs, or other eyes or hearts, 
or other living cells, or other biophores, or 
other molecules, or at the very least other 
atoms, upon which to base a social life. En- 
vironment is sometimes described as now social 
and now physical or natural, but the distinction 
is quite parallel to that between whole and part. 
One's natural environment is social to one's 
parts, its natural character answering only to 
one's unity or wholeness. 

There is, furthermore, another implication in 
the consciousness of an object than this of 
sociality. Not only is social life the deeper 
truth of the otherness of the not-self, but also 
an individuality of self is involved in it. With 
this, too, the popular mind is quite familiar. It 
is commonly recognized that an individual is, 
quite of necessity, conscious of his outer world 
in some particular peculiar way, although in a 
way always organically related to the conscious- 
ness of others. No two see any one thing alike ; 
and yet no one thing is exclusively what any 
single individual finds it, nor again is it the mere 
sum of many views of it, nor the abstracted 



INTRODUCTION. 2J 

residue of the differences in many views. Any 
thing is what all as individually related to it and 
to each other find it. Thus the actual function 
of the object of consciousness would seem to 
be exactly what we know the deeper function of 
language to be. Language, we are told very 
often, is a medium at once for the expression 
and for the exchange of thought; but this does 
not mean that language ever brings or ever 
should or could bring a literal agreement between 
those who use it. Language has as its natural 
function the adjustment or organization of dif- 
ferences. Those who use it come only to agree 
to differ. What are creeds and statutes but 
means to the distinct organization of differing 
individuals? Certainly they are far from effect- 
ing any real communalization. The object of 
consciousness, however, is only the most general 
case of these, and it has the same differentiating 
function. Above it was called a social institution, 
and social institutions exist for the preservation 
of differences, developing individuality and so- 
ciality together, not the latter at the expense of 
the former. Were the institution a separate, 
external, independent thing, were it in the most 
general instance a distinct self-existing substance, 
the case might be very different; but being 
nothing more nor less than a principle or a 



28 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

relation, it mediates differences or organizes 
individuals in the way suggested. Environment, 
still another name for whatever is essential in 
language or in the object or in the institution, 
is no external medium of a social life, but is 
itself an actual social life directly related to 
whatever it is said to " environ." 

To put the same truth in still another way, if 
all were conscious of an object on literally the 
same terms, then the object itself could have 
reality, or objectivity, to none. It could be real 
to any one, for example, only if other forms of 
life than that which he was peculiarly were also 
related to it in ways individually peculiar to 
them. Consciousness, then, is essentially and 
fundamentally commercial; or, in the short 
sum, objectivity means not only sociality but 
also real individuality, it means that society is 
an organism. 

So, in general review, the self, with whose 
expression the science of psychology is con- 
cerned, is conscious simply by virtue of its 
being alive, and it is rational in that it is con- 
scious; and the object of its consciousness is not 
something separate and external, but a vital 
incident of a social life, involving in its very 
being a larger social responsibility for the self 
and at the same time an actual individuality. 



INTRODUCTION. 29 

If this seems mere assertion here, in spite of 
what has been said in the pages now passed, 
there is still a chance of a satisfactory demon- 
stration in the more analytical chapters that are 
to follow. 

But before leaving this Introduction the other 
view of objectivity should be considered, at least 
briefly, since it affords a method of procedure, 
or a general scheme for the division of this 
book. Thus, among many thinkers the objective 
has been taken as that which exists in the strict- 
est sense of the word apart from the self, or 
exists, in other words, independently or in and 
of itself; and under this general view, directly 
opposed to what has been observed here, things 
and ideas and acts have all been said to be 
objective, but in as many different ways. In 
what sense things, such as trees, stars, books, 
men, stones, are regarded as objective can be 
quickly seen. They are spatially objective, 
being separable from the conscious self and 
from each other by measurable distances. The 
objectivity of things is, then, spatial or physical. 
Ideas, however, are said to be objective in a 
different way. They may be independent of 
any individual consciousness, they may exist 
apart, but the predicates of space have appar- 
ently no literal connection with them. They 



30 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

are objective in so far as convincing, in so far 
as they are necessities of thinking. The ideas 
that one accepts as true in spite of oneself are 
objective. Mathematical axioms are usually 
given in illustration of such ideas, and some- 
times the moral law and religious beliefs. And 
finally, as for acts, these are objective in so far 
as done by a force or agency, sometimes said to 
be spiritual, sometimes altogether physical, that 
is wholly distinct from the self to whom they 
seem to attach. Usually we hear of the objec- 
tivity or reality of things, the truth of ideas, and 
the worth or morality of acts ; but, terms aside, 
just as the real thing has been thought to de- 
pend on isolation or independent existence and 
the true idea on a sort of intellectual externalism 
or determinism, so the moral or worthy act has 
been regarded as contingent upon a power be- 
yond the self. An act has been bad either 
because the devil did it or at least because 
some other than the true self did it; and, if 
good, one 's act has been taken as giving evi- 
dence of a separate nature, divine, all-powerful, 
infinitely perfect, working its way, asserting its 
will in the life of wholly dependent man. But 
objectivity on this basis, whether as reality or 
as truth or as worth, carries with it as its neces- 
sary consequents an isolated selfhood, a wholly 



IN TROD UCTION. 3 1 

alien environment, and a strictly communalistic 
society. Still, as if in spite of these conse- 
quents, it has been and is now much believed 
in. At least the unrefiective consciousness 
seems to believe in it. 

The following questions, accordingly, as differ- 
ent ways of pursuing a further inquiry into 
the nature of the objective, will not seem un- 
timely: What is the world of things? What 
are ideas? And what are acts? Old ques- 
tions, it is true, — very old questions; but, after 
all, their antiquity only makes them new. 
Answers to them, moreover, will be the bur- 
den of this book; Part I. being given to "The 
World of Things," Part II. to " The World of 
Ideas," and Part III. to " The World of Acts." 
The hope will be throughout to interpret the 
views of ordinary life without losing anything 
important to life itself. Perhaps the worth of 
life will be enhanced by the conception of the 
objective, already outlined here, which, instead 
of teaching isolation of subject and object, finds 
them vitally related, organically one. 



$art i. 

THE WORLD OF THINGS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PART AND WHOLE. 

DEEP truths are born of simple thoughts. 
The simplest thought that one can have 
of the world is that it is a whole made up of 
parts. The world as a composition of parts 
is the world of things. Chemists, physicists, 
botanists, geologists, astronomers, biologists, 
money-changers, rulers, or the most ordinary 
laborers all find the world a composition of 
things, — of atoms, perhaps, or heavenly bodies, 
or more ordinary things. 

But in so simple a fact as composition, the 
philosopher finds much more than the mere 
aggregation that appears to the casual observer. 
True, the term thing is a very general term ; 
and when we speak of the world of things, we 
seem to say nothing or almost nothing about 
it. Thing is only one of the names for the 
commonplace ; but God and I are others. As 
regards the term thing, one is at first disposed 
to agree with the logicians, who find the mean- 
ing or intension of a term changing inversely 



36 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

as its application or extension. Thing, then, 
being applicable to everything, means in itself 
nothing. And yet, when one takes second 
thought, the thing appears as one of the mira- 
cles of the world. It is, forsooth, nothing more 
nor less than the miracle of individuality. 
The commonplace, however, is always miracu- 
lous. So in the world of things we have the 
wonderful world of individuals. The logician's 
rule is reversed, extension really deepening 
meaning. What all things are lies close to the 
heart of the universe. Individuality is certainly 
a very deep characteristic. 

The individuality of everything involves the 
impossibility of any classification of things, as 
classification is commonly understood. Indi- 
viduality requires that no two things be alike ; 
and if no two are alike, then grouping any 
two \inder some one head can be possible 
only through neglect of certain differences, only 
through an identification of unlikes. But are 
no two things alike? If they were, they could 
not be known as two. The mere enumera- 
tion of them very definitely differentiates them. 
Classification must of course be of a number, 
of two or more; and sense of number, however 
vague, depends on sense of difference. It is 
almost an old saw to philosophy, that com- 



PART AND WHOLE. 37 

parisons are always between unlikes, and con- 
trasts between likes; and the truth in it is just 
that now under discussion. Classification or 
enumeration is necessarily of unlikes. What- 
ever unity exists among things cannot be inde- 
pendent of their differences. 

Number may have been taught in the schools 
again and again as if it were naturally applicable 
to things or units all alike, but the teaching was 
wrong. Thus, ten silver dollars are all different, 
for the simple reason that somebody has found 
them ten; just as the ten "equal" parts of a 
line, or the ten " equal" sectors of a circle, are 
all different. Enumeration or classification does 
two things : it makes the many one, and it gives 
a special individual place and character to every 
single member of its whole. But this is not 
the sort of classification usually recognized and 
talked about. In truth, a line of ten parts 
would not be a line if the parts were ten, as 
most of us have been taught to understand 
number. It might be any undetermined group 
of ten unit-lines, or only one unit-line counted 
ten times ; but it could not be in itself one line. 
It might be a lot of parts, but it could not be a 
whole. Any number must be also one. In the 
matter of the ten dollars, the sum or whole, 
the one, must have a meaning to somebody 



38 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

in terms of some end. An end, however, would 
necessarily give to each part, to each dollar, its 
own particular place, even its own particular 
role. A tenth dollar is qualitatively different 
from a ninth, and ten as a whole is different in 
kind from nine as a whole. 

But while it is true that things are not to be 
classified in the ordinary way on account of 
their differences, may they not, do they not, 
have certain common qualities through which 
a grouping of them is possible? Thus, red 
things would form one class, regardless of their 
other characters ; hard things, another ; men 
as human, but not animal, another; and so on. 
Yes, such a grouping of things as this is pos- 
sible, but unfair to the things or to the so-called 
common quality. It neglects something essen- 
tial in the things themselves. Different things 
do not even have common qualities. Qualities 
are not marks of things external to the things 
themselves. Most surely a red rose is not red 
as anything else is red. The redness of a rose 
is peculiar, because the rose itself is peculiar. 
No quality of anything can be independent of 
any of all its other qualities; and to assume 
an independence is to make the quality an alto- 
gether external mark, and then not a quality. 

So, as the term is generally used, classification 



PART AND WHOLE. 39 

of things is impossible. Isolation, however, is 
as unfair or as artificial as classification. As 
things absolutely alike could not be known as 
many, so things absolutely different could not 
be known as different. Recognized difference 
is in itself evidence of some unity. Things 
seen to be different cannot but belong to the 
same whole, being means to one and the same 
end. Classification may identify unlikes, but 
with equal certainty separation isolates likes. 

Many doctrines in science, some even of com- 
paratively recent date, as well as many notions 
in every-day life and many institutions of society, 
have asserted or assumed the possibility of an 
identifying classification or of its counterpart, an 
isolating separation. The mediaeval doctrine 
of the genus, the doctrine of the immutability 
of species or persistence or disappearance of 
types, the Deductive Logic, the doctrine of in- 
heritance of acquired traits, the nativistic or in- 
tuitional theories of morals and religion, all the 
monarchical institutions of society, all systems 
of caste, are distinctly hostile to any real indi- 
viduality, since they assume that individuals can 
be either herded under some common arbitrary 
head or excluded absolutely. All of them re- 
duce the class to a mere composition of individ- 
uals united by no inner nature of their own, but 



40 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

by some external principle. All commit the 
sin of identifying unlikes or separating likes, or 
both. Natural enough has been the claim of 
monarchs to authority by divine right ; and the 
reference of concepts or class-ideas to another 
world has been natural too, since the source of 
unity has been thought quite external to the 
things unified. 

The simple truth is that composition involves 
an intrinsic unity of the component parts. In 
short, parts are more than mere component 
parts ; they are related parts, being related to 
each other with reference to some end to which 
all are means. As was said above, merely to 
count them, to know them as many, is to relate 
them. Not a mere composition of parts, then, but 
a system of relations, each thing being a relation, 
is what the deeper regard of the world of things 
reveals. Things are not component parts united 
through some external unity, but a system of rela- 
tions with a unity quite its own. A chair, for ex- 
ample, is a system of relations ; so is a man ; and 
so the earth as a whole on which we live or to 
which we in turn are related. Moreover, each one 
of these illustrating systems is itself a particular 
relation within a larger system. Any part of 
the universe is at once a relation itself within a 
larger whole and a system of relations within 



PART AND WHOLE. 41 

itself as a whole. Any thing is both a part and 
a whole. Thus a foot is itself composed of 
inches in a certain relational system and is a 
relational part of some larger length, a yard or 
rod or mile. 

It may be unusual to some to think of the 
world of many things as a system of relations, 
but however unusual it cannot be without real 
significance almost from the start. Certainly 
no thing ever means anything, ever has any 
reality, except as it is related to other things. 
The very essence of meaning, indeed the primary 
test of reality, is relationship. A thing is real 
in proportion to the measure of the universe 
that is discoverable in it. Multiplicity of rela- 
tions is what makes for substantiality. 

Says some one here, and very appropriately : 
" There is a wide difference between saying that 
things are relations and that things are related. 
Were they only relations, there could be no real 
things, no terms of relation, only pure formal 
relationship. A world of mere relations must 
be impossible, since there must be things, defi- 
nite, real, substantial, among which the formal 
relationship prevails. There must be cousins as 
well as cousinship, legs and arms as well as the 
angles and other relations that enter into the 
determination of a chair, coins and commodities 



42 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

as well as prices." But relationship is other 
than the mere formal external condition that the 
objector here has in mind. Relationship is not 
formal, but dynamic. It is, quite in and of 
itself, substantial. It cannot be both real and 
formal. 

To make the distinction between formal and 
actual or dynamic relationship quite clear is not 
at all easy. In the first place, however, it may 
at once be admitted that the existence of sepa- 
rate substantial things would be a necessary 
supposition if an only formal relationship pre- 
vailed. There would, then, be two distinct 
spheres or worlds, one of things and another of 
relationships. Imagine, for example, a dualism 
of cousins and cousinship ! But relationship as 
actual does away with any dualism. Yet what 
does actuality mean here? How can relation- 
ship really be substantial? 

Consider a very practical question. Do we 
make a chair out of things or things out of a 
chair? Suppose some one answers that we 
make it out of things, out of legs and arms and 
rounds and seat and back and glue and so on. 
Then arises a very serious difficulty, since the 
things are not legs nor arms nor rounds nor 
glue until made so by the chair. The whole, 
accordingly, makes its parts ; and the answer 



PART AND WHOLE. 43 

given above is turned against itself. Parts and 
whole are not two separate realities ; they are 
one and the same reality. The parts are rela- 
tions ; the whole is a system of relations ; and 
each involves the other in itself. Relationship 
makes both the chair and its members. So con- 
ceived, however, relationship is essential in 
things ; it is the things themselves, not a formal 
condition of them ; it is substantial. The chair, 
then, makes its parts quite as truly as the parts 
make the chair; and the chair, be it added, 
is really no chair until through active use it is 
related to things beyond itself. Use or activ- 
ity relates, and so in use or activity lies that 
which makes relationship actual. Things, how- 
ever, always are in some use. 

Again, imagine a river, a boat, a pair of oars, 
and an oarsman, and consider how until the 
activity to which they are means is expressed 
only the most formal relationship prevails 
among them and they have themselves only 
a quasi reality. The activity, however, which 
fulfils the end to which they are all means, makes 
their relationship real. Relationship, indeed, — 
and this is the important fact, — means activity. 
The two, relationship and activity, are one. 

So not things exist and are related, as two 
distinct facts, but the existence or actuality of 



44 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

things is relationship; and the things them- 
selves imply the very activity that realizes their 
relational character. In short, the world of 
things as relations is intrinsically a mechanism 
in action; and, more than this, it is a mech- 
anism in action from a power or force that is 
involved in its very nature. The world of 
things is a self-active mechanism. This, how- 
ever, is anticipating a little. 

A world of things as relations, a system of 
relations, is intelligible, intrinsically intelligible. 
Of course a mere composition cannot be in- 
trinsically intelligible, being intelligible only 
through a unity external to itself. Things intel- 
ligible in this latter way may differ from each 
other, but only by a difference so absolute as 
to be without meaning, that is to say, by a 
difference of complete exclusion. Intelligible 
in the former way, intrinsically intelligible, they 
have differences that are positive conditions of 
their unity. Oars and hands and boat and 
water, or a chair's legs and arms and rounds, 
or a man's heart and stomach and lungs are 
different, widely different, but always in a way 
consistent with a unity quite within themselves. 

In the case of extrinsic intelligibility, while 
the mind might be said to have apprehensions, 
it could not be said to apprehend things in 



PART AND WHOLE. 45 

themselves ; it could apprehend only some- 
thing external to things in themselves; but in 
intrinsic intelligibility, which belongs to things 
that are not formally but dynamically or actu- 
ally related, mind is in and of the things appre- 
hended, being indeed the relationship itself or, 
since this is dynamic, the relating activity. In 
short, in intrinsic intelligibility things in them- 
selves can be apprehended; and, as a second 
consequence, the intelligible is also intelligent. 

The dependence of intelligibility upon rela- 
tionship was indicated earlier in this chapter. 
It is one of the self-evident facts of life. As 
said before, we understand a thing only as we 
can find other things involved in it. We believe 
in a thing's permanence and reality only as we 
see its dependence on other things. But now 
a still deeper implication of relationship is 
present to us ; namely, the intelligence of the 
intelligible. Not only are things intrinsically 
related, and so intelligible, but also in them 
and of them exists a relating activity, which is 
intelligence or mind. The self-active mechanism 
is inherently intelligent. Intelligence is but the 
natural self-activity of a system of actual relations. 

Of great interest is it to know how the early 
thinkers, the ancient Greeks for example, reached 
the conclusion that mind or intelligence belonged 



46 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

intrinsically to the world. They too, although 
almost blindly at first, declared that in a world 
of relations mind was real. Thus, Anaxagoras 
taught that the world was composed of homoeo- 
meries, each one of which, a sort of atom, con- 
tained at least in some measure everything to be 
had in the universe. It was as if he had con- 
ceived the world as an infinitely perfect mixture 
of all its elements, so perfect a mixture that each 
infinitesimal part contained some portion of 
every ingredient represented in the whole. A 
perfect mixture in truth ! It is no wonder that 
expounders have frequently described Anaxa- 
goras' primitive world as a hash ; for a hash it 
certainly was, in which each part contained the 
whole. And a world so mixed, so composed, 
the great thinker asserted, was moved by mind, 
which had power over all things ; it was con- 
trolled by intelligence. But his hash or infi- 
nite mixture is plainly only the world of relations, 
as he crudely saw it. Only a thing, or a part, 
as a relation, can be said to contain the whole. 
In a word, Anaxagoras with his world of homoeo- 
meries had all but reached the conclusion of the 
identity of relational character and intelligence. 
" Infinite mixture " is only a physical way of de- 
scribing relational character; and the homoeo- 
mery only a physical abstraction for the thing, 



PART AND WHOLE. 47 

that is to say, the individual part, as a relation. 
What crude thinker does not have his disguises ? 
Anaxagoras might have said of a line, that it 
was made up of liomoeomeries, that is, of points 
or positions, each one of which "contained," 
which is to say implied, the whole ; but his 
meaning could be nothing more nor less than 
that a line is not a mere composition, but a rela- 
tional whole. 

So, in summary, the deeper truth in the sim- 
ple fact of the world's composition is the fact of 
relationship, which makes the unity of the world 
consistent with the differentiation of its parts ; 
and because the relationship is dynamic instead 
of formal, being even identical with the world's 
activity instead of a passive condition, the world 
of things is intelligible, and, by virtue of its in- 
herent intelligibility, also intelligent. Even once 
more to repeat, things are not mere relations ; 
they are not merely related ; they are themselves 
in so far as real a relating activity, which is 
mind. Mind is the movement in things ; it " has 
power over all things." x 

1 In a paper before the American Psychological Associa- 
tion on " Epistemology and Physical Science — a Fatal Paral- 
lelism," I have indicated how Chemistry and Physics, and 
even Mathematics, as well as Epistemology, need to recognize 
that parts are not things only formally related, but themselves 
actual relations. See Proceedings for 1897. 



CHAPTER II. 

CHANGE. 

r I ^HE world of things as a self-active mech- 
■*•■ anism must be a changing world. The 
nature of change, however, is a difficult problem, 
and in philosophy it has had many and widely 
divergent solutions ; but in general it is evident 
to any one that the solution for those who think 
of their world as a system of actual relations will 
be very different from what it is for such as see 
only a composition of separate or merely out- 
wardly united things. 

The question of change is the question of 
motion ; or, rather, it is, in the first place, only 
more general than the special question of travel. 
What is it to travel? Does the traveller move 
away from one place to another, each place and 
he himself remaining unchanged, the change 
consisting in a transition quite apart from its 
conditions, or is travelling in some way expres- 
sive of the existing relations of different places 
to each other? Plainly the former would have 
to be the case, if the world were a composition 



CHANGE. 49 

of places, each place being wholly alien to the 
next ; but the latter, if the world be a system 
of relations. In the former case the traveller 
leaves wholly behind the place from which he 
goes — and many people do seem to travel on 
this plan ; but in the latter his motion is rest 
also, — that is, he both goes to a new place and 
remains in the old, or, as the same thing, takes 
the old with him. In other words, at least for 
the Relationism, to which this book is already 
committed, travel is commerce, not separa- 
tion ; it is a staying at home as well as a 
wandering. 

And now, secondly, in the world of relations 
what can be said of motion? Certainly not 
that any isolated thing moves, nor yet that the 
whole moves, but that in motion the inner nature 
of the whole is expressed, motion being rather 
a fulfilling than a radically changing process. 
All are familiar with the idea of the relativity of 
motion. The relativity of motion, however, 
means simply that motion, like travel, is always 
expressive of the existing relations of the parts 
of some whole. 

When the Greeks, to whose early thinking 
reference has been made here already, reached 
the notion of space as made up of points, which 
are of course dimensionless parts, having no 

4 



50 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

size, no distance, only position or relationship, 
very properly, although without fully under- 
standing themselves, they inferred that in such 
a space motion must be an illusion. " The 
flying arrow rests," one of their subtle thinkers 
was bold enough to proclaim; and again: 
" Achilles, swift of foot, can never overtake the 
tortoise." They very properly reached this 
conclusion about motion, because' in a space of 
related positions motion could be only the ex- 
pression or fulfilment of the spatial relationships, 
being that wherein these relationships were 
made real or substantial. Any moving thing, 
for example, could never be said to have aban- 
doned its starting-point, or for that matter any 
part of its path, but even in being at its starting- 
point or at any other place in its progress it 
would be also already at its destination. Of 
Achilles one might say paradoxically that he 
never could or never would overtake the tortoise, 
because from the very beginning he had already 
overtaken him. So, again, motion is the mani- 
festation, not of a composition or aggregation of 
isolated positions, but the interaction or the 
organization of always related positions. Of so 
large a whole as the solar system, if we speak 
strictly and reflectively, we can say neither that 
the whole system is moving somewhere, we 



CHANGE. 5 1 

know not where, nor that any part, say any 
planet, moves in its own peculiar path, but that 
in all the manifold movements we have fulfilled, 
that is, made real and substantial, the system 
itself. In fine, whatever one's ordinary con- 
sciousness may be disposed to, it is obvious 
enough to second thought that movement in a 
path is also rest. The movement of the part, 
the relational part, is the rest of the whole, the 
rest of the system. 

And change, like motion and travel, is also 
always expressive of existing relationship. Were 
the world composite in the sense of being with- 
out an intrinsic unity in its parts, change could 
be possible only as a series of absolute deaths, 
only as a constant complete destruction and a 
constant wholly novel creation. In a composite 
world does not the very difference on which 
change of course depends have to be a differ- 
ence that wholly alienates? But, the world be- 
ing relational, change is the expression of the 
relations of things, — as said now so often. Not 
the whole as whole changes, nor does any part 
in and of itself change ; but change is the inter- 
action of the parts in their expression of the 
unchanging whole. As motion is rest, as travel 
is also staying at home, so change is the ever 
fulfilling expression of what always is. 



52 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

And change of this sort is not merely possible 
in a world of actual relations ; it is inevitable, 
being essential to the relational character itself. 
A relational whole must be active within itself; 
it must be self-active. Indeed its self-activity 
has been anticipated here, when actual relation- 
ship was found to be inseparable from activity. 
Just as a line becomes a motion, or at least the 
real path of a motion, as soon as its character 
as a system of actually related positions instead 
of a composition of only formally related parts 
is fully realized, so also the world becomes a 
sphere of activity, nay, activity itself, so soon 
as the relational character is clearly appre- 
hended. A relational whole is, ipso facto, self- 
active ; it is, then, animate ; it is, to repeat 
from above, intelligent as well as intelligible ; 
in a word, it is an animate intelligence. In the 
world of related things, or rather of things as 
relations, there is present necessarily the very 
spontaneity to self-expression, which as mani- 
fest in certain special forms is called life. The 
world of change is a living world. 

Perhaps this conclusion from premises so 
simple and so simply stated will seem sudden 
and as absurd as sudden. Somebody is sure 
to insist that it takes volumes, not pages, to 
prove life essential in the universe, and that 



CHANGE. 53 

-» 

even after volumes the proof is not always 
convincing. Well, that may indeed be; but 
length itself is certainly no better foundation 
of a proof than simplicity, and some may 
fairly choose the latter. The conclusion, then, 
even after only a short chapter or two, is that 
life and intelligence are one. The universe 
lives, and all life is intelligent. All life thinks. 
The universe thinks. 



CHAPTER III. 

ORGANISM. 

r I ^HE name for such an animate system of 
-*- relations as the world of things proves 
to be, a name that every thinker to-day is using 
constantly and that is indeed a sort of cry or 
watchword for every great cause in modern 
life, is organism. The world of things is an 
organism, — a spontaneously changing, living, 
intelligent organism. 

But this is to deny existence to the inorganic, 
since the world of things is all-inclusive. Many 
there are, however, who cannot admit such a 
denial to their thinking. What can be said to 
them? Well, it certainly does deny positive 
existence to the inorganic to find organic life 
in the world as a whole, but it does not deny 
meaning. Inorganic is a negative term, and 
negation in general is too easily misunder- 
stood. As hinted in an earlier paragraph, it is 
frequently taken to be evidence of another 
order of being than that denied, although the 
thinker has always to end with the discovery 



ORGANISM. 5 5 

of an identity between a thing and its negative. 
Only thinking brought Greek and Barbarian 
together into one life, and Jew and Gentile; 
and in modern times thinking has brought man 
and not-man, or animal, together. Thus man 
and animal are not now properly regarded as 
two separate orders of being. Negation, then, 
instead of being a process of final separation, 
is really a way of relating and uniting. What 
men really mean by the inorganic — this being 
the case in hand — is so much of what the 
world contains as fails to come up to an idea 
of the organic that is determined by certain 
discovered and at least partly understood forms. 
Simply the inorganic is not organic as certain 
recognized specific forms are organic. Still, 
even in thinking of it at all, men at once relate 
it to the organic that is known to them, and 
so definitely assert a fact or a principle of 
organism that is deeper and broader than any 
of the already recognized organic forms. Of 
that which they have found to be the lowest 
form of organic life they are forced again and 
again to say, as a consequence of their own 
thinking and of their own experience too: 
"After all, this is only an organism; it is not 
the organism ; it is not the vital unit. For the 
organism we must encroach still further upon 



56 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

what has seemed till now the inorganic." The 
bounding line, accordingly, set by the negation 
is at best a moving line ; and in view of this 
shifting character negation itself is seen to be 
rather a principle of organization than an in- 
dication of any determined dualism between 
such and such established forms as the organic 
and such and such other established forms as 
the inorganic. Whatever dualism exists, in 
other words, is rather an incident of organic 
life itself than a witness to an absolutely in- 
organic realm of being. 

Natural scientists, inspired by the idea of 
evolution, have frequently said in so many words 
that life has sprung from the lifeless, but they 
have always subsequently discovered that what 
had seemed lifeless was really living. Experi- 
ments purporting to create life out of the life- 
less, although appearing successful at first, have 
always been exposed and discredited in the end. 
And when we are told, for example, that the 
warm rays of the sun striking down upon stag- 
nant pools are productive of life, we are 
thoughtless indeed if we suppose this to be 
evidence of abiogenesis. The fact, so far as it 
is a fact, indicates not how life is created, as if 
it had not existed before, but, more precisely 
than we had known before, what an already 



ORGANISM. 57 

existing and an always existing life really is. 
No more fatal charge can be brought against 
such as believe in an absolutely inorganic world, 
in the inorganic as a substance or form of reality 
quite by itself, than this necessity to which they 
are brought of believing in a sudden coming 
into being, or in what to all intents and purposes 
is a miraculous creation. 

Of course life is an effect; it must have a 
cause. But causation is not creation. A cause 
is only an essence, or a principle, or an under- 
lying function or process, which in its effect has 
an express fulfilment. Some would have it, as 
indicated above, that the sun shining on the 
stagnant waters creates life. The condition of 
being stagnant, however, already is life, so that 
there is no creation ; and, in the special terms 
of these pages, causation finds its proper ex- 
pression in the simple fact that relational char- 
acter, as if a warming sun, animates even the 
" inorganic," but ouly because it is itself the al- 
ready existing condition of the " inorganic." Life 
appears in nothing to which it has not always 
belonged. 

So, again, it does deny distinct existence to 
the inorganic to find the world of things an all- 
inclusive, a spontaneously changing, living, in- 
telligent organism, but it clearly does not deny 



58 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

meaning. The meaning of the inorganic is 
simply that life is larger and deeper than has yet 
been realized, that the living forms which have 
been recognized are, after all, only organs in an 
including organic life. Put paradoxically, the 
meaning of the inorganic is nothing more nor 
less than that reality is essentially organic. 
Negation, or separation, is vitally incident to 
organism ; or, from above, it is rather a principle 
or function of organization than a witness to 
anything like a fundamental dualism. 

And of course parallel to the separation of 
the organic and the inorganic is that in technical 
psychology of self and not-self, of subject and 
object; and all that is true of the separating 
negation in the former case is true also of the 
separating negation in the latter case. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE BODY. 

JUST such an animate system of actual rela- 
tions or just such an organism as the 
whole world of things proves to be is exem- 
plified in any individual body. Perhaps the 
human body affords the fullest exemplification 
of the world's nature, of its relational charac- 
ter and animation ; but in any body whatso- 
ever that nature can be found. Doubtless this 
seems to approach very near to anthropomor- 
phism, but anthropomorphism is not a re- 
proach, if one does but see the man, to whom 
the world is likened, in his essential and world- 
wide, world-deep characteristics. 

To enumerate evidences that the body is an 
animate system of relations, self-active and 
intelligent, is possibly unnecessary, but an enu- 
meration may not be without some interest. 
Thus : («) the body is an instrument of adjust- 
ment ; (#) within certain limits the functions of 
its different parts are interchangeable, or, other- 
wise put, it is an instrument of adjustment to 



60 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

itself as well as to what is without; (V) none 
of its organs act in isolation, but all as one 
always; (jT) its consciousness is subject to a 
law of relativity ; and (/) its sensation, or con- 
sciousness, is not confined to any specific 
organs, called organs of sense, but is a func- 
tion of the interaction of the parts of the 
organism as a whole, belonging to organic life 
as such, not to any specific forms. Of each of 
these five facts, which are only a few of the 
many that might be cited in evidence of the 
body's intelligence, a few words may be said. 

{a) That the body is an instrument of adjust- 
ment, every one recognizes. The body is in- 
deed often called a tool, a mechanism, and is 
said to have been given to man as a means to 
his expression of himself in the world. Its 
different parts, too, notably the hands, are fre- 
quently and not improperly called tools. Still, 
suggestive as this the mechanicalistic view of 
the body and its parts is, it is all too likely 
to lead to serious misunderstanding, and it cer- 
tainly does not adequately represent what is 
here intended by the body as an instrument 
of adjustment. To say the least, one must get 
well behind the mechanicalistic theory before 
fully understanding what adjustment is. True, 
in every act expressing adjustment a tool or 



THE BODY. 6 1 

mechanism of some sort is used ; but there is 
never any real adjustment effected unless the 
used mechanism is capable of adapting itself 
through appropriate inner modifications to the 
results of the activity. The strictly mechan- 
icalistic view ordinarily assigns to the body no 
such capacity, and yet such a capacity there 
must be. The body is a mechanism, but a 
mechanism that constantly adjusts itself to the 
results of its own activity ; and such a mechan- 
ism is a living organism, defined heretofore as 
a substantial system of .relations or an animate 
intelligence. Adjustment, too, being quite de- 
pendent on the capacity of inner modifications 
in the mechanism employed, would be alto- 
gether impossible in any universe save such 
an one as was itself an organism. In such a 
universe, since each one of its parts, or organs, 
by dint of the relational character would " con- 
tain the whole " and would accordingly be in an 
original adjustment to the whole, any action 
would always express the whole, and from the 
standpoint of the individual to whom it was 
referred would be as much an adjustment to 
self as to anything without, as much inner mod- 
ification as outer accommodation. But mechan- 
icalism is committed necessarily to a dualism 
of agent and mechanism, for it has to make 
5 



62 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

activity nothing but outer accommodation, the 
active self assuming something alien to its 
nature. According to mechanicalism, in other 
words, the self arbitrarily puts on, or depend- 
ency, helplessly submits to, a certain way of 
life, instead of expressing its natural self in a 
life naturally its own. According to the line 
of thought, however, that is followed here, such 
a dualism is out of the question, adjustment 
upon its terms being quite without meaning. 
The body is, then, an instrument of adjustment 
only for acts of real self-expression ; and for 
the source of agency we do not have to look 
beyond the body itself, self-activity as well as 
capacity for complete adjustment being involved 
in its very organic or relational character. 

(Ji) As was said in so many words, the inter- 
changeableness of functions is only further 
indication of the real nature of adjustment. 
Thus it is a phase of the necessary inner modi- 
fications. The term " interchangeableness," 
however, has to be qualified, since it can by no 
means be taken literally, being justified only 
in the lack of a better. What it really refers to 
is the 'well-known capacity of recovery from 
loss or injury through the use of another than 
the affected part. At times a lost or injured 
part is wholly restored; at times the recovery 



THE BODY. 63 

is limited to substitution ; but in general it is 
to be observed that injury, or even loss, is only 
an extreme form of the constant need of adjust- 
ment or self-expression that man and organic 
life must ever meet with, and also that the 
recovery, like adjustment at any time or under 
any conditions, is possible only because the 
whole, or suppose we say the idea of the whole, 
is always active in every part of the injured 
creature. In man recovery by restoration is 
unknown except in cases of the minor parts or 
organs, such as the nails; a lost arm is lost for 
life. Man, accordingly, has usually to depend 
on substitution, as when losing the eyes he has 
to see with ears and fingers, or when losing his 
right hand he has henceforth to hold his pen 
and other tools of his activity in his left, the 
substitution being possible only because to 
have acquired an activity is at the same time to 
have trained other parts, not exactly to the same 
activity, but at least to a moving sense of the 
relations involved in the same activity. Thus 
the left hand is trained to write, although in a 
mirror-script, even while the other acquires the 
direct activity of writing ; and between any two 
organs in the body essentially the same sym- 
pathy must prevail. But in lower forms of life 
than man recovery is more likely to be by 



64 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

restoration. The lower the forms are, the nearer 
are they to being mere groups of similar organs 
instead of highly differentiated organisms ; and 
restoration, accordingly, among them is not 
essentially different from simple reproduction. 
Again, however, among the higher forms such 
as man even the lost as well as the injured parts 
are restored in the offspring. The method of 
recovery, then, would seem to depend on the 
point of view naturally taken in any specific 
case; and, not to prolong this discussion, it goes 
almost without saying that any one who would 
comprehend what the activity in organic life is 
should be able to reduce to a single funda- 
mental process the three chief forms of adjust- 
ment here referred to, — restoration, substitution, 
and reproduction. Moreover, in the process of 
reproduction, if this term may be used for the 
typical process, exactly such a change must be 
fulfilled as has been found natural within an 
animate system of relations. 1 Reproduction 
can be only such a change as is incident to 
the expression, or self-being, of an organism. 
To one's deeper thinking change, reproduction, 
and adjusting activity are but different names of 
one and the same thing. 

(c) That none of man's organs act in isola- 

1 See chap. ii. 



THE BODY. 65 

tion is one of the things commonly recognized 
but seldom very seriously applied. The Whole, 
however, so the familiar principle runs, always 
is active in every part. So true is this that 
scientifically one is forced to say that walking is 
not only with the legs but also with the hands, 
or that seeing is not only with the eyes but also 
with the fingers. Simply, to repeat, any specific 
activity is of the whole in the part, not of the 
part alone. Not to refer to other cases of sepa- 
ration, it has been the habit of many to insist 
upon separating at least the organs of con- 
sciousness and the organs of conduct or posi- 
tive overt activity, as if the system of organs 
for conduct and the system of organs for con- 
sciousness were substantially distinct; but even 
such a separation is obviously not in accord 
with the true character of organic life. Con- 
sciousness, as has been seen already, and as will 
be seen still more fully hereafter, is a function 
essential in organic life as such, not a power of 
certain isolated organs. That we see also with 
our legs and arms is plain to any one looking 
at the ascending stairs or the lofty mountain or 
distant tree, or at the distant object of any kind. 
Distance appeals sensuously to the organs of 
movement as well as to those of mere vision. 
Recall, too, that the violinist often becomes 
5 



66 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

hoarse while he plays. A recent author 1 of an 
interesting work on the painters of Florence 
has recognized that the eyes live not to them- 
selves alone, when he makes the tactile values 
of a picture important to its success. He finds 
a picture more than mere color and form ; he 
finds it also something to touch, something 
which we seem to touch even while our eyes 
behold it; in other words, which we see not 
only with our eyes but also with our fingers. 
He might, however, have gone even farther, and 
found values for all the senses in the experience 
of any one, and sensation itself in consequence 
a function of the whole organism. 

(aT) But the psychologist finds the animate 
intelligence of the body most clearly shown in 
the Law of Relativity, so-called, to which all 
consciousness is subject, and according to which 
the meaning of any experience is dependent 
on its relation to all other experience past and 
present. Is the stone on which you happen 
to place your hand hot or cold? Whichever 
it be, the experience of your whole life in each 
and every detail, trivial or important, is in its 
quality. Are you given over to certain tenets, 
religious or political? In them, too, your own 
individual life finds expression. With this rela- 
1 Mr. Bernhard Berenson. 



THE BODY. 67 

tivity of all experience the science of psychology 
has long been concerned. Introspection and 
experimentation have been employed to define 
and interpret it. But the most striking results 
have been reached, naturally enough, in the 
simple experiences of the different senses. 
Some have even found a law of mathematical 
precision. The work and conclusions of We- 
ber and Fechner are well known. Weber 
thought himself justified in asserting as the 
Law of Relativity that the different sensations 
of any particular sense depended upon a cer- 
tain constant ratio of increase in the physical 
stimulation, and Fechner went so far as to say 
that the sensation changed proportionately to 
the logarithm of the stimulus. Weber and 
others have found special fixed ratios for dif- 
ferent senses, — " difference thresholds," as they 
are styled ; for example, one-thirteenth for pas- 
sive and one-nineteenth for active touch, ac- 
cording to one set of experiments ; one-third 
for visual sensation; three-tenths for hearing; 
and so on. But such accurate results have 
to be taken with several grains of salt, and can 
be said only to show conclusively the general 
principle of dependence or relationship. It is 
enough to condemn them that they really pre- 
suppose not only an isolated consciousness, but 



68 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

also an isolation of the several sense-organs. 
Implicitly, however, back of their form of state- 
ment, they conclusively demonstrate that a 
sensation is not a psychic atom or entity, un- 
changing and exclusively individual, but an 
actual relation. Mathematical formulae, applied 
to physical changes, could not be more fatal 
to the atomist's standpoint. In general, ideas 
are not many, but one always. The self has at any 
time, and has had through its whole life, but one 
idea or one sensation, the succession and varia- 
tion in its experiences being due only to natural 
relational differences. In so simple a succes- 
sion and variation as offered by the sentence, 
" Every man should know his own mind," the 
words are all different, but the idea is one, 
each different word being only a specific indi- 
vidual expression of the organic whole; and 
so with any consciousness in the life of the self. 
Why, life as a whole is only the expression of 
a long, highly complex sentence, the end of 
which is in the beginning. 

(e) That the body is an animate intelligence, 
or that the nature of consciousness is just that 
assigned to it already, is indicated further in the 
virtual refusal of modern psychology to assign 
any limit to the number of the special organs of 
sense. In the first place, if a limit were assigned, 



THE BODY. 69 

consciousness would have to be looked upon as 
in some way or in some measure external to 
the essential nature of the organism, or the 
organism to be endowed with that self-con- 
demning dualism of organs of consciousness 
and organs of mere action or physical process. 
But psychology to-day finds the number of 
sense-organs indefinite. Different names are 
used, and about many of the organs there is 
much controversy, but agreement in setting no 
limit to the number is very general. Thus, in 
addition to the five senses of tradition, — those of 
sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, — we hear 
to-day of a motion-sense, a temperature-sense, 
a special sense for cold, the " cold-spots," and 
for heat, the " heat-spots," and special senses 
even for pain and pleasure; and the eye has 
been said to be at least three distinct organs, 
being made up of one each for the three colors, 
blue, green, and red, and the ear two, one for 
music and another for noise. So, secondly, 
whatever may be said of the particular terms in 
which this multiplication of the organs of sense 
is expressed, it must eventually have the effect 
of turning consciousness into something that 
belongs vitally, not formally, to the organism. 
It must make consciousness more than a mere 
being aware of something outside or external ; 



70 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

it must make consciousness inherent in the 
self's expression of an existing relation to 
something. 

And certain very direct conclusions from an 
indefinite multiplication of the conscious organs 
will show its meaning still more clearly. Thus, 
(i) it makes any localization of the self in a 
particular part of the body altogether unnatural 
or unnecessary. The self is neither in this 
selected part nor in that ; the self is the organic 
activity of the whole ; nowhere, because every- 
where ; not itself localized at all, because always 
expressing the relations of localized parts. 
Surely no one would say to-day that the func- 
tion of digestion is localized in the stomach, but 
the self is only the central function of all the 
recognized specific functions. 

Then (2) consciousness, being due only to 
the interaction of organic parts, being vital or 
essential in organic life itself, cannot possibly 
be of anything altogether external to the con- 
scious subject. So long, it is true, as one holds 
to the notion of a limited number of organs of 
consciousness, one must also hold that there is 
something outside to which the self has no re- 
lations or which is in its nature quite different 
from that of the self. The very limitation will 
create the dualism. The outer world may be 



THE BODY. 71 

visible and audible and tastable and tangible 
and smellable, but here its positive relations to 
the conscious self would have to end. In cer- 
tain properties, of course distinctly physical 
properties, it would be quite separate and un- 
like, — in such properties, for example, as its 
space, its motion, and its force. But when one 
assigns no limit; when one makes sensation a 
general principle, not a character peculiar to a 
few organs ; when one finds that the world is 
more than merely tangible and audible and 
tastable and smellable and visible, being wholly 
and thoroughly able to the organism, — then the 
dualism completely disappears, having a foot- 
hold for itself neither in the nature of the self 
nor in the outer world to which the self is so 
completely related. The motion-sense alone is 
enough to refute the dualism of mind and mat- 
ter, the psychical and the physical, since motion 
has long been set down as the essentially 
physical property, the so-called primary quality 
of matter. In short, then, the not-self, or object, 
the outer world, is essentially and thoroughly 
able to the subject; and plainly this is only an- 
other way of saying, what has been suggested 
before, that subject and object, although dis- 
tinguishable, are both naturally incident to an 
organic life, of which the subject alone is but a 



72 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

relational part, the object being the subject's 
otherness, or its negative, or the sphere wherein 
its adjustment to the other relational parts is 
realized. Any organic whole must, by virtue of 
its active nature, offer to each of its parts, or 
organs, an object or sphere of ableness. For a 
simple illustration, consider again the relation 
of such an organ as the hand to the whole body. 
Very much as the hand might be said to have 
its object, or not-self, in the other parts of the 
body, so any individual has a consciousness of 
the otherness or negativity that the very indi- 
viduality makes within the including organism. 
But (3) the object of consciousness here 
under discussion is, in general, the medium of 
the subject's expression of itself; and the fore- 
going leads to the conclusion that this medium 
is no abstract medium, external in its nature to 
the subject supposed to use it. On the contrary, 
the object as medium must be altogether nat- 
ural, or, let us say, in remembrance of a para- 
graph or two in the Introduction, altogether 
social to the subject, alive with the life of the 
subject, and always adapted to its activity. Not 
an abstract medium, then, as if a dead language, 
to which the self could conform only mechani- 
cally, or only by taking upon itself an unnatural 
activity, but a living mediator, whose activity is 



THE BODY. 73 

already the self's own. Even matter, so this 
amounts to saying, is a mediator, not a medium. 
Physical science has thought otherwise ; and, to 
touch upon what some would refuse even to 
mention in a work of any rational pretensions, a 
science that has called itself " Christian " has 
undertaken to elevate man to an irresponsibility 
to matter and its natural laws, — an undertaking, 
by the way, which does but show how ready 
the Christian is to draw conclusions from 
Physics. But matter, as here appears, is actu- 
ally able, or possible, to the self, being nothing 
more nor less than that in which the self lives, 
and moves, and has its being. " Christian Sci- 
ence " might have been so much more useful in 
the world, if only it had not been so seriously 
misled by Physics. No alien life is the life of 
nature, of physical nature, but man's life in its 
deeper responsibilities ; his strength and hope 
and immortality. Man's very consciousness of 
it is evidence of his lasting communion with it, 
and of its mediating worth to him. 

" Gross materialism " charges somebody, in 
the absence of any real reflection on what has 
now been said ; but enough that it is not ma- 
terialism, or that the implied idealism of the 
assailant is undoubtedly of a piece with gross 
materialism itself. Merely to utter the charge 



74 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

is at once to be guilty, although indirectly and 
unwittingly, of the same abstraction and par- 
tiality of view. Then, too, in face of the fact 
that matter must stand for some reality in 
the sphere of human experience, it would be 
hard indeed, if not impossible, for any philoso- 
phy to avoid being in some way materialistic. 
In these modern times names have ceased to be 
conclusive arguments. 

But, to resume, in the ways that have been 
mentioned here and discussed at some length, 
the body is intelligent intrinsically, as itself an 
animate system of relations, being one in charac- 
ter with the world of things. And, to emphasize 
perhaps the most important point in the whole 
chapter, the body's natural intelligence involves 
a living mediation, which is to say, a social medi- 
ation between itself as subject and the world 
about it as object. This living mediation, how- 
ever, or organic relationship, between subject 
and object, is strikingly manifest in the nature 
of space, which is commonly regarded a pecul- 
iar character of the outer world. To the outer 
world, accordingly, to the world in space, the 
thought of these pages must now turn. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE OUTER WORLD. 

IN philosophical discourse the phrase " the 
outer world " has been almost as ambigu- 
ous as the term " objectivity." The two terms, 
indeed, "outer" and "objective," have often 
been used synonymously, so that both of them 
have to be taken as referring now to things in 
space, now to true ideas, and now to adjudged 
or evaluated acts. Here, however, by the outer 
or objective is meant only the spatially or physi- 
cally so, although this special meaning, upon 
being clearly understood, will prove to be not at 
all out of accord with the other two, but in what- 
ever is essential virtually identical with them. 
Objectivity, as has been intimated more or less 
definitely already, neither begins nor ends with 
the sheer existence of things in space, since these 
are relations, not atoms ; nor with the merely 
true ideas, since mind is the fulfilling activity of 
relationship, not an isolated function of the self. 
Still, as said, in order to discover the real unity 
of the three different meanings, one must take 



J 6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the first, which is the simplest or most palpable, 
and search after what is essential to it. So, as 
the leading question in this place, What makes 
the world external? or, What is space? 

That space is something which the self relies 
upon and always uses in relating itself to its 
world, goes without saying; but, curiously 
enough, there have been many who have had 
such a purely formalistic notion of what the 
relating act is that they have imagined the 
space in which it takes place to be wholly in- 
dependent of the act itself. Thus they have 
supposed space an empty but perfectly real 
something, an actual form in which the world 
of things finds itself, and man, or any living 
creature, lives or acts. The obvious fact that 
any condition of being can never be external to 
that which is, or that any means to an activity 
cannot but be a part of the activity, not apart 
from it, seems wholly to have escaped them. 
In their theories of knowledge they have been 
sometimes intuitionalists, sometimes sensation- 
alists, — the former when they have found their 
formal space a peculiarity of mind, an a priori 
form ; and the latter, when, in recognition of the 
other side of the dualism, which is certainly 
equally worthy, they have found it a peculiar- 
ity, a wholly physical or " primary " quality, of 



THE OUTER WORLD. 77 

matter. Still, it has not made any difference at 
all in which direction they have turned, whether 
in that of intuitionalism or in that of sensation- 
alism, since both alike, as doctrines of space, are 
certainly not less externalistic or formalistic 
than almost every one to-day knows them to 
be as doctrines of morals and theology. Of 
course a few are left who think that the moral 
law or that God's nature is something in which, 
and merely in which, the world's creatures have 
their moral or religious life ; but in general 
such isolation of the worth of life is satisfying 
at the present time neither to preachers and 
reformers nor to scientists. And, in regard to 
space, whether one studies it ontologically or 
psychologically, — that is to say, as to its own 
nature or as to the genesis of one's consciousness 
of it, — it is found to be very far from a mere 
form of being or activity. Space is no formal 
condition of our life, but something essential in 
our life; no form in which we live, but some- 
thing that we live. Space, in short, is a living 
force ; it is dynamic, not formal. 

In the first place, if viewed ontologically, 
space is a force, not a form ; for its parts are 
relations, and relationship is real only if 
dynamic. Again and again human thought has 
tried to compose space out of simple points, 



78 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

but the point refuses to be a component part. 
Simply a space composed of points can have no 
reality, since either its parts will be separated 
by intervals, or vacua, and then in space, not 
space itself, or will be absolutely contiguous, 
and then, however numerous, without magni- 
tude singly or collectively. In a space of com- 
ponent points, too, motion can have no reality, 
since it would of necessity consist either in a 
succession of wholly unconnected positions or 
in a continued rest in some one position. In a 
space of relations, however, motion is not only 
possible but necessary, being only the ever 
actual fulfilment of the relationship. Motion 
is not in space, but of it. Hence the essen- 
tially dynamic character of space, 

But, secondly, to most the psychological 
evidence of the nature of space is clearer. 
Psychology finds space, as it were, a force which 
man applies whenever he acts. Thus, to begin 
with less technical considerations, in the nature 
and history of architecture, which depends for 
its meaning so largely upon spatial character- 
istics, the dynamic nature of space is unmistak- 
able. Space is so much material, out of which 
buildings are made, the peculiar curves and 
angles determining the shapes into which this 
subtle material is formed. Curves and angles, 



THE OUTER WORLD. 79 

however, so different for different peoples or 
for different times, are sure records of life's 
conditions, be these climatic, geologic, or eco- 
nomic; as so often said, they are the crystal- 
lized life of the people whose artists create 
them. To their great buildings, however, 
men turn rather for inspiration and motivation 
than for mere reminiscence. The great work 
of architecture is a temple whose very curves 
and angles speak to men of the life that they 
are actually living. It is, then, no mere place 
of worship, but itself shares in the life that 
the worshipper would realize; no form for life, 
then, but alive itself. 

The common units of measurement, further- 
more, are indications that the measured space is 
a living force. Such units, for example, as the 
foot, the ell, the cubit, the fathom, the span, 
the pace, and the finger all give what they 
measure a dynamic character. Like them, 
too, in principle are "a stone's throw," "shout- 
ing distance," "as far as eye can reach," and 
so on. And a wayfarer, in reply to an inquiry 
as to how far he has come, says that he has 
come so far that his legs refuse to hold him; 
or some one says to a farmer, perhaps to an 
advocate of free silver, " How large is your 
farm ? " and he gives answer, " Large enough 



80 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

to be mortgaged, but not large enough to feed 
a family. " Then it is safe to say that children 
have to gauge their crying to the distance of 
the nurse. " Nurse was a frightful scream 
away," the neglected infant may be imagined 
to say, "and a good deal of kicking too." And 
so, in general, space, or quantity in any guise, 
is never measured abstractly, but always in units 
of a vital experience, in units of work of some 
kind. "All quite true enough," some one here 
interposes, "for primitive life and for ordinary 
consciousness, but hardly fair to the higher 
mathematics or to exact, abstractly accurate 
measurement in any form." Well, possibly; 
but does not even an exact, abstract mathe- 
matics have some activity in view? When is 
measurement, however accurate, without an in- 
terest in the adjustment of some agent to the 
means and incidents of his activity ? Accuracy 
only brings a greater freedom ; it only liberates 
a greater force. No space is so dynamic as the 
unerring mathematician's. To put the case 
somewhat figuratively, or ideally, the course 
that is exactly so many standard feet in length 
and of exactly determined grade and curve is 
the natural course of the well-trained runner, 
swift-footed and sure-footed. Training and 
accuracy go together. 



THE OUTER WORLD. 8 1 

How does a child get his consciousness of 
proportion and general space relationship? At 
first, in what seems a blind impulsiveness, he 
fumbles both himself and the things around 
him; he traces outlines with his fingers; he 
falls from some one's lap or down the stairs; he 
creeps in and out and under; until, what with 
bumps and bruises and other bits of space- 
wisdom, he comes to give their distinct and 
relative values to reachable and unreachable, 
short and long, right and left, up and down, 
near and far, curved and straight, getting in 
the end a spatially ordered world. The order 
presented to his consciousness does but reflect 
the freedom that he has acquired to move 
among the ordered things. Indeed, the order 
and the freedom are identical, the inner mean- 
ing of his objectively ordered world being his 
own positive activity. 

But technical psychological theory, dealing 
with the problem of space-perception, uses 
terms that are applicable not merely to the 
mind of a particular race as active in architec- 
ture, nor to the mind of the measurer of size or 
distance, nor to the mind, the mental life of 
the child learning to reach and walk and ges- 
ture, but to mind as such, to mind in its most 
general activity. Thus, technical theory says 
6 



82 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

something like this. Space is the harmony 
and realized mechanical relationship in so 
much of the self's experience as comes through 
eye, finger, and muscle; so to speak, it is the 
architectural edifice, not of some special peo- 
ple's mind, but of mind itself, which relies in 
its work upon the fundamental conditions of 
consciousness, the experiences of the various 
senses, and the ever-present organizing activity 
which these experiences imply. Space is the 
relational whole which constitutes the world 's 
ableness to an organic self tluxt sees and feels 
and moves; or, to give the psychological doc- 
trine more directly still, the perception of space 
results from, or consists in, the association of 
visual, tactual, and muscular sensations. Of 
course this association involves at least two 
things: (i) mechanical relationship among the 
associated elements, that is, adjustment of all 
the different elements to some single activity 
or expression of the self, and (2) symbolization 
on the part of any element of the meanings or 
values of the other elements, — on the part of 
the visual sensation, for example, of the mus- 
cular and tactual. A space, however, that is 
so related to the self, or that is perceived under 
such conditions, must be at least as much a 
motive as a form of the self's activity; and, if 



THE OUTER WORLD. 83 

a motive, then active itself. So, as remarked 
above, space is a force, which the self applies 
whenever it acts; the application of force being 
identical with the liberation of an activity 
which only fulfils the organic relationship be- 
tween the self that applies and the force that 
is applied. 

Space, then, as a force is not, and cannot be, 
separate in its activity from the self. The activity 
of one is the activity of the other, else there 
were no dynamic value for the self in space and 
no consciousness of space on the part of the self. 
Remember that the self is in and of the body, 
which is spatial in character, and as of the body 
is a part of the whole world in space. What 
creature is not a part of its own environment? 
Or what environment is not a part of some crea- 
ture's body? But part really means relation ; 
and the creature, or self, that is a part of its own 
environment, or that has in its environment a 
part of its own body, is in its deeper nature 
the actuality, the fulfilment or perfection, of a 
relationship. Such fulfilment, however, must 
be in an activity which identifies body and 
environment. 

So, in conclusion, space being what we have 
found it, the outer world cannot possibly be an 
alien world. Were space the mere form that 



84 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

some would still have it, distance would have to 
mean absolute isolation, and distant things would 
have to be independently substantial ; the outer 
world would be also another world, distinct in 
kind, as external to the self as the space in 
which it existed. But space is a force, being 
organically one in its activity with the activity 
of the self; and spatial objectivity, accordingly, 
must consist in something else than mere dis- 
tance, depending rather upon the relating activ- 
ity, in which subject and object are one and 
inseparable. In short, the objectivity of the 
outer world is not distinct from that of adjudged 
or evaluated acts, but identical with it. Spatial 
or physical objectivity is spiritual also, or the 
same as worth. In a simple formula spatial 
separation is only an incident, at once a condi- 
tion and a result, of organic activity. 

Biological speculation has reached this con- 
clusion, too, although in some quarters without 
any real appreciation of the identity of its 
thought with that of recent psychology. From 
its long study of the relation of organism and 
environment, biology has come to assert the 
originality of habit or adjustment. Original 
adjustment, however, means (i) that there is 
no essentially inorganic or alien environment, 
and (2) that the existing dualism of organism 



THE OUTER WORLD. 85 

and environment is part and parcel of organic 
life itself. For biology, then, environment can 
no longer be imagined to impose a strictly 
formal life upon organic creatures ; and one can 
now say of environment, as of space, that it is 
not a form but a force, not a dead mechanism 
but a life. " A living mediator," it was called 
in a former chapter ; and exactly this which in 
so many words is said of environment by the 
biologist can be said of space by the psychol- 
ogist. Space, wherein the self has relation to 
an outer world, is a living mediator. 

Benedict Spinoza had his way at least of fore- 
shadowing the doctrine of original adjustment 
or of space's or environment's living mediation. 
His very monism was of course a promise of it; 
but in one or two of his special utterances he 
seems to have been extremely happy, and no- 
tably when he aphoristically suggested that it 
took a hammer to make a hammer. Here, 
surely, he put the whole story in a phrase. 
Thus, the hammer is an important tool in civil- 
ized life, and has come to be made with wonder- 
ful skill and used with marvellous accuracy. 
Its principle, however, is present in all the in- 
struments of man's activity, so that we might 
say that all tools are hammers, or even that the 
outer world as a whole is a hammer. To any 



86 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

one having regard for underlying principles, 
such a generalization can give no difficulty. 
But, as the wise Spinoza said, it took a hammer 
to make a hammer. The outer world, then, the 
world in space, must be a tool, not merely for, 
but always and originally in, the use of the self. 
A tool in use, however, is force ; a tool in use 
lives. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE TWO-FACED OBJECT, OR LANGUAGE. 

A SUMMARY of the five chapters now 
■**- completed seems desirable here. It can, 
however, be very short. Thus : 

(#) The world of things is a system of rela- 
tions, and has its substantiality in its relational 
character, the relations being actual not formal. 

(b) As a substantial system of relations, the 
world is active within itself, self-active, animate ; 
and therefore intelligent as well as intelligible. 

(V) Change, or difference, is essential to rela- 
tional character, but always only as fulfilment 
or substantial expression. The relational uni- 
verse would not be substantial without change. 

(X) The animate intelligence that the world 
is, in other words the living organism, induces 
by its own activity a constant differentiation 
within itself, on which rests the dualism of self 
and not-self, or subject and object, or organism 
and environment. 

(e) This dualism, as between two organically 
related or organically acting factors, is shown 



88 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

on one side in the intelligence of the body, and 
on the other in the distinctly dynamic character 
of environment, or more narrowly of space. 

(/") The outer world is a tool originally in 
the use of the self; an always adaptable tool, 
then ; nay, this rather, a living mediator. 

And here the first part of our study might 
very well close, for as regards principles noth- 
ing more is to be added. But there is left a 
certain implication of what has been said that 
should be brought out, if for no other reason, 
at least to make the coming transition to the 
second part, on "The World of Ideas," seem 
less abrupt. So to this helpful implication let 
us now turn. 

The outer world, the world in space, is the 
" perceived " world, as psychology knows it, 
or the " natural " environment, as biology knows 
it; and this world in its unity and wholeness, 
and particularly in its apparent permanence, 
answers only to the freedom of action already 
secured by the perceiver of it. Quite properly 
has perception been identified with the pe- 
ripheral organs, whose activities are of a rela- 
tively permanent character, and mark at once 
the more habitual life of the individual and the 
accomplished adjustments of society. The pre- 
sented unity of the perceived object cannot 



THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 89 

but reflect the organization that a more or less 
reflexly acting peripheral system testifies to. 
Every organism, however, must be itself a 
singly acting system of individual organisms — 
or organs — and must accordingly act always 
in a tension between the already existing and 
persistently surviving unity of the component 
parts and the relating and realizing unity of 
the organic whole ; and its consciousness, ac- 
cordingly, incident to the tension, must invari- 
ably be of two aspects, being perceptual and 
naturistic from the standpoint of the unity of 
the first sort, but conceptual and social from 
the standpoint of that of the second. This 
important fact about the organism and its con- 
sciousness has indeed been touched upon al- 
ready, 1 when it was said that the object of 
consciousness was more than mere object, 
being incident to and accordingly always indi- 
cative of a social life, and again 2 in the dis- 
tinction that was drawn between the natural 
and the social environment. Now, however, 
the sociological implication in the conscious- 
ness of an outer world — that is to say, in 
perception — is still more clearly defined. Con- 
ception, however, which was just now identified 
with consciousness, as seen from the stand- 

1 See p. 23 sq. 2 See p. 26. 



90 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

point of the realizing unity of the organic 
whole, has always been regarded, in the first 
place, as one and the same with individual 
self-consciousness, and, in the second place, as 
having for its object a socially universal idea. 
So we have here only an interpretation of a 
doctrine of long standing. 

But, to state the case once more, environ- 
ment is " natural " and perceived, or " outer," 
to an individual's consciousness, in so far as its 
relations to his merely mechanical activity are 
concerned. This mechanical activity, being 
" reflex " and representing the acquired ad- 
justment, naturally seems confined, now to this 
special organ, now to that ; but in reality it is 
all the more expressive of the unity of the en- 
tire organism, because mechanical, and it is, 
besides, of a positively social value, because the 
basis of the instinctively social life. Space, for 
example, is the " natural " environment of the 
organs of motion, in which the individual lives 
a well co-ordinated and relatively unconscious 
life, both within himself and among his fellows. 
But the mechanical or reflex activity is always 
in tension with a more central function, which 
is none other than the fulfilling and therefore 
always change-bringing organic life itself, and 
without which there would be no consciousness 



THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 9 1 

at all. Do but recall that the relations of an 
individual's organic parts are not formal, but 
actual. Were they formal, automatism would 
indeed prevail ; but, being actual, they give to 
the individual a self-conscious life in addition 
to the mechanical and a conscious social life in 
addition to the instinctive, — in short, a social 
environment in addition to the " natural." In 
an earlier reference to the outer world, whether 
in its spatial or in its material character, as a 
social institution, exactly this two-faced nature 
of environment was involved. 

Not for a moment must any one take the 
meaning here to be that the social and the 
natural environment are literally distinct. To 
neither one belongs any special or fixed set of 
objects. Each, indeed, is always in possibility 
the other. The two stand for a relationship, not 
for a mere classification in the world of things. 
Ordinarily animals are natural to man, and only 
other men are social, but sometimes the reverse 
is true; and similarly, in the relation of any 
higher form of life to a form below it, the social 
may turn natural or the natural may turn social. 
The difference is one of organization ; as has 
been said, it is one of part and whole; and to 
understand it we need only to reflect upon the 
very nature of organic life. Thus, even a second 



92 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

time in repetition, a living organism must be a 
singly acting system of individual organisms — 
or organs — or else, of course, an individual 
organism — or organ — in a system ; and from 
this necessity each individual has a two-faced 
environment, and the organic whole to any one 
of its parts is always a hierarchy of higher and 
lower forms. In neither the duplicity of en- 
vironment, however, nor the order of the hie- 
rarchy is there any irrevocable fixity other than 
that required by organic life itself. Manhood, 
for example, not men, is what makes environ- 
ment social to man, and men higher than animals. 
But now, finally, another name, also used 
before although without the fulness of meaning 
that is certainly possible now, can be given to 
the natural or perceived environment, or the 
outer world. The outer world is essentially 
linguistic. It is the language through which all 
the manifold forms in the hierarchy of organisms 
have intelligible communication, and are so en- 
abled to lead at once a single and an indefinitely 
differentiated life. In some special aspects it 
may seem to mediate only the life of certain 
special organic forms, as for example in the 
written and spoken symbols that make human 
society possible ; but, so to speak, there is a 
hierarchy of languages that is parallel in its 



THE TWO-FACED OBJECT. 93 

relations and functions to the hierarchy of or- 
ganic groups, and the whole outer world as such 
has a linguistic value. Even objects that to 
man's ordinary consciousness are not linguistic, 
seeming nothing but mere objects, are so in 
reality to some phase of his activity. 

Language is a name that only more fully 
interprets the conception of the outer world as 
" a tool in use." With the mediaeval logicians, 
we can see in it a living mediation. But in the 
development of our present study it is the natu- 
ral bridge between the world of things and the 
world of ideas. 



$art ii. 

THE WORLD OF IDEAS. 



CHAPTER VII. 

IDEAS AS FORMS. 

IN the chapters just summarized the interest 
has been chiefly in the world of things, — in 
the world that was said to have " physical ob- 
jectivity." But the physically objective world 
has been found to be of such a character as to 
be objective, not to a self substantially apart 
from it, as so often supposed, but to a self 
belonging to it or organically involved in it. A 
living mediator, we were able to call it. Now, 
however, our interest turns to the world of 
" rational objectivity," the world of ideas. What 
precisely is the rationally objective? 

Ideas are often looked upon as the forms, 
or, to use a sort of metaphor, the " heads," 
under which things appear to mind. They are 
thought to be peculiarly the content of mind 
or the objects of mind. Mind knows, so it is 
often said, not things but ideas, ideas being 
quite different in character from things, al- 
though being at the same time mind's way of 
relating itself to things. Sensations as well as 
7 



98 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

ideas of a higher sort, such as conceptions, are 
really only forms or heads or peculiarly mental 
objects, — that is to say, according to a widely 
accepted psychology. 

But this prevalent psychology is hardly con- 
sistent with conclusions that have been reached 
here about both mind and things. The doc- 
trine of ideas as forms can obviously keep 
company only with that of things as separate, 
merely component individuals and of mind as 
alien to body. Not under any conditions can 
it stand with things as relations and mind as 
the inherent relating activity, which is the very 
substantiality of things. Of course, in the very 
fact that two such doctrines as those of formal 
ideas and of component things can be said to 
belong together, mind is seen to have been 
made a function of things, and so to be intrin- 
sically related to them ; but this is only a logical 
implication of the doctrines themselves, not a 
condition recognized by their supporters. And 
as to the inconsistency with the conclusions of 
these pages, that does not of itself relieve us of 
all responsibility to the views in question, since 
for wholly practical reasons, if for no others, to 
neglect views that are widely entertained is 
always a great mistake; and, theoretically, 
intelligent rejection is a very important part 



IDEAS AS FORMS. 99 

of successful thinking. In successful thinking 
it seems as necessary to know clearly what is 
not as to know what is. Here, then, before 
considering the consistent doctrine of ideas we 
shall examine carefully the inconsistent one. 

Perhaps it is not yet clear what is meant by 
the idea as a form. Is it not, however, clear 
that ideas, as mind's views of isolated indi- 
viduals, would have to be, from the standpoint 
of the individual things, abstract, universal, 
immaterial ? Mind's recognized function is uni- 
fication, and the things which ideas are sup- 
posed to unify are denied any unity of their 
own, under the view before us. The unifying 
idea, then, cannot but be wholly extrinsic to the 
unified things ; and this extrinsic character 
makes it " formal." Suppose so common a 
term as man were applicable to men as unre- 
lated individuals, society being by nature a 
mere aggregate of social atoms ; then the idea 
of man expressed in the term could mean 
nothing at all beyond implying the existence of 
a sort of man in general, a universal man, be- 
longing to an altogether different order of being. 
Men might belong to earth ; but the type, the 
universal, in which mind would have interest, 
could belong only to some unearthly realm. 
And so of any term, if its application be under 



IOO DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the same notion of what a group is, one has no 
choice but to say that so far as indicating a 
unity in the group it is a mere name, only so 
much breath; and that so far as having any 
reality of its own it is real in an absolutely 
different sphere. Simply, if things are not 
intrinsically related, then ideas as mind's ways 
of relating or unifying them must belong to a 
world quite their own; the world of things 
and the world of ideas, or, more generally, 
matter and mind, must be two wholly distinct 
kingdoms of reality. 

Furthermore, if ideas have such an alien ex- 
istence, then are they not only formal, but 
also interesting merely as so much knowledge, 
and always expressed in a medium as alien 
or abstract as they. As formal, they are 
rather that in which things are known than a 
knowledge of things themselves ; they have no 
meaning in recognition of individuality; 1 and 
they make possible the sort of classification, 
criticised above, that identifies unlikes and sep- 
arates likes. Formalism could hardly be better 
defined than in this way, — unity without regard 
to differences, or differences undetermined by 
unity. But, if formal or abstract, ideas must be 

1 Unless their formalism be seen as only the other side of 
atomism. 



IDEAS AS FORMS. IOI 

marked " For knowledge only." To have them 
simply as so much mental treasure can be the 
only true interest in them. Ever to seek to ap- 
ply them, or fulfil them in the world of things, 
would be illogical, self-contradictory, since they 
have by nature no dealing with the world of 
things. They are mind's, and mind is of an- 
other world, and the knowledge of them must 
have its worth within itself, be for its own sake, 
since — without contradiction — it cannot be 
said to have any other end or purpose whatso- 
ever. Knowledge wholly for knowledge's sake, 
science wholly for science's sake, is an ideal, a 
cry not infrequently heard at the present time, 
and it evidently presupposes that ideas are 
mere abstract forms, the content of an alto- 
gether alien mind. 

Knowing mere knowledge, however, having 
an abstract consciousness of ideas, has in human 
life, particularly in education and in training of 
every sort, a certain value. Thus it always in- 
volves an almost if not quite exclusive emphasis 
upon the different media of self-expression. 
Suppose one were asked to walk a walk, or talk 
a talk, or look a look, or in general do a deed. 
In walking a walk one could not be interested 
in going anywhere or seeking anything, only in 
walking, that is, in moving the legs ; and, simi- 



102 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

larly, in any of the other activities one could 
live only in the abstracted, unrelated medium 
of expression. Elocutionists ordinarily do no 
more than talk talks or speak speeches, and out 
in society countless people are mere lookers of 
looks. The value, in short, in knowing mere 
knowledge is directly proportional to the need 
of identifying the self with the unmeaning me- 
dium of activity. Knowers of mere knowledge 
do learn formulas, rules, precepts ; they are 
masters of apt phrases and storehouses of quo- 
tations, and perhaps even intellectual gymnasts ; 
but they are not thinkers. Indeed, whoever 
knows what he knows and that he knows is 
always much better as a talker or writer than as 
a thinker, and much more acceptable, too, to 
his unreflective and readily marshalled fellows; 
but the thinker, greater than any medium or any 
uniform, never can be quite clear, even to him- 
self. The thinker is one who rather enacts or 
applies than merely knows ideas. In a universe, 
however, of alien or abstract ideas — such as the 
sensations and the conceptions of the still cur- 
rent psychological theory — there can be no 
thinkers, only gymnasts. 

Schopenhauer, writing more than half a cen- 
tury ago, was unable to discover in human life 
any other hope than that of doing mere deeds 



IDEAS AS FORMS. 103 

and knowing mere knowledge, and he drew at 
once the conclusion that the thinker, as if a 
duck condemned to live out of water, could 
have no more ideal act of will than suicide. 
Whence or how the unfortunate duck came 
upon the earth the great pessimist failed to ex- 
plain satisfactorily, but his philosophy is on the 
whole a very profound comment upon abstract 
idealism ; and a very fair exemplification of both 
his premises and his conclusions can be seen to- 
day in school and church and state, where not 
only in a doctrinal but also in a practical way 
intellectual suicide is the rule rather than the 
exception. 

The best illustration of the abstract medium, 
in which formal ideas are expressed, is a dead 
language. A language is dead in so far as it is 
the medium of a strange or alien experience. 
There are other dead languages than Greek, 
Latin, and Sanskrit, and these just named are not 
dead because Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Any 
language, any medium of expression, studied me- 
chanically, — that is, with only a dictionary and 
grammar or their equivalents, — is dead ; for ex- 
ample, German and French, as commonly taught. 
Geometry and Physics are often fairly describ- 
able as dead languages, for they are not free 
from mechanical methods, and their objects of 



104 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

interest, space and matter, are media of expres- 
sion. Both in theory and in experiment even 
psychology has treated matter as the dead lan- 
guage of the sensuous consciousness. And, in 
the same wider use of the term, gymnasium ex- 
ercise, or the athletic cult in all its phases, so 
prominent a part of recent education, is a dead 
language. Its being this, too, makes it only a 
perfectly logical part of a curriculum that in 
general knows no medium but the unmeaning 
medium, and no idea but the abstract, wholly 
vacant form of an absolutely immaterial mind. 

But there is still another important conse- 
quence of isolating things from each other and 
mind from things. If ideas are formal, and so 
for knowledge only and expressed in a lifeless 
medium, then also will mind as knowing such 
ideas require at least two faculties, — the faculty 
of thought and the faculty of sensation. Through 
the former will come the consciousness of the 
ideas themselves, through the latter of the mere 
medium expressing the ideas ; and the two will 
be of course as distinct, as different in kind, as 
their objects. Moreover, as something belong- 
ing logically to the abstraction of mind, both 
sensation and thought, each in its special way, 
will have to transcend its own consciousness, — 
sensation by being conscious of an insensible 



IDEAS AS FORMS. 105 

matter that manifests itself extrinsically in the 
sensations or sensuous qualities of color, odor, 
and the like ; and thought by being conscious of 
ideas that manifest themselves extrinsically in 
so-called perceptions. In education the dual- 
ism here indicated has been put into practice, 
now by exaltation of the " Deductive Method," 
which emphasizes the consciousness of ideas, 
and now in exaltation of the " Inductive Method," 
which would emphasize the consciousness of 
things or media, — now in principle-lessons, now 
in object-lessons. Contrary to what seems to 
be usually supposed, object-lessons, although 
marking a reaction against principle-lessons, 
rely upon essentially the same character in 
mind. Both are dualistic. 

And to this dualism there is incident also the 
limitation of consciousness to a few special and 
distinct organs in the body. Reference has 
been made to such limitation before. Ob- 
viously it depends upon, or itself has led to, 
the abstraction or isolation of the medium of 
conscious self-expression. It makes the mental 
life a life quite by itself. And if consciousness 
is peculiar to a part of the self, then its object, 
in exact proportion to the partiality, will be 
abstract ; whence that need of the second fac- 
ulty, the first apprehending the object, the sec- 



106 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

ond that for which the object is an abstraction. 
The second faculty, moreover, the faculty of 
thought, is assigned a place in the brain, so 
that the dualism gets a physiological founda- 
tion in the several organs of sense, on the one 
side, as the seat of consciousness of the mere 
medium of expression, and the brain, on the 
other, as the seat of the consciousness of the 
mediated ideas. 

So, finally, as logically one, there are all 
these different views of the world and mind's 
relation to it: (i) things isolated or atomic; 

(2) ideas formal, the objects of an alien mind; 

(3) consciousness self-centred, existing only for 
consciousness' sake; (4) media of expression 
abstract or lifeless; (5) the faculties of the 
mind distinctly two ; and (6) the conscious life 
of the organism confined to certain particular 
organs, — sensation to the special sense-organs 
and thought to the brain. These are some of 
the important doctrines belonging to abstract 
or formal idealism ; and affording us, as they 
do, so many standpoints, or let us say so many 
points of attack, they cannot but assist to the 
understanding of our contentions here for a 
relational or organic universe and an inherent 
mind. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATION. 

FORMAL Idealism has had its source in 
conditions of the past. That the past 
persisting in the present always makes for- 
malism, goes without saying, and that formalism 
itself is real only retrospectively, is also clear. 

The formal idea and the abstract medium, as 
they are found in the life of to-day, date back to 
the beginning of the Christian era, being of a 
distinctly Christian-Roman origin. They are, 
in fact, lineal descendants of the revealed or 
infallible law and the Incarnate Word. Accord- 
ing to the earlier Christianity, and particularly 
according to the use that the Roman power 
made of the habit of mind which Christianity 
defined and inculcated, the medium of man's 
self-expression was fixed, given, imposed, abso- 
lute, divine. Human life, in consequence, was 
not here, but naturally in another world ; not 
man's own, but God's or Rome's. In Christ, in 
the Roman emperor, in the written and spoken 
language, in the very coin of the time, life 



I08 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

found only an other-world mediation. Roman 
law and Christian dogma combined to effect 
what may fairly be called a separation of the 
individual from himself, making him live apart 
in an ideal or spiritual somewhere, called the 
Kingdom of Heaven by the Church and citizen- 
ship by the State ; and, living there, he became 
a very good soldier, indifferent to the changes 
of the world about him, even to death itself. 
Of course, however, soldiers were the supreme 
need of the time. 

The soldier is the very incarnation of Formal 
Idealism. His mind is not his own, for he is 
allowed only to know knowledge and do deeds. 
His individual consciousness and his activity 
are two distinct things, and his body is medium, 
not for any deeds of his own, but solely for 
those of God's Kingdom, of Church and State, 
in which he trustingly lives, passive even through 
his greatest activity. 

In the Christian-Roman militarism, then, the 
formal idea and the abstract medium of to-day 
had their rise. But our present consciousness 
of them as formal and abstract shows that our 
times are outgrowing them. As the not-self is 
the past self — witness the doctrine of evolu- 
tion — so the formal is the outgrown. Society 
to-day has another conception of mediation than 



HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATION. J09 

the Roman and early Christian, or at least than 
this as it is seen by the present time. Not 
Christ's life, but a Christian life, is the burden 
of the preaching in many pulpits; and the 
change, which has its parallels in social and 
political life as well as in scientific theory, does 
but mark the evolution of the Roman into 
something besides a soldier. 

Now to some, perhaps to many, religion and 
its cherished history will seem degraded by the 
present declaration of a virtual identity between 
the religious attitude towards the Word Incar- 
nate and the secular attitude towards all the 
different media of every-day life ; but to such 
religion must be a very small thing indeed. 
Why not give to religion its accruing tribute? 
Religion is the supreme education, as it is also 
the supreme government or the supreme con- 
trol in general ; for more than any other influ- 
ence it determines the bent or habit of mind, 
which manifests itself and has to manifest itself 
in life as a whole. Men live their religion 
in their every-day life very much better than 
is commonly supposed. The much preached 
ideal is no more and no less than an existing 
fact, an already realized condition. Indeed, 
only because already realized, has it any value 
as an ideal. 



IIO DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

And psychological doctrine does but define 
the self and its mind in ways that accord with 
the determining influence of religion. Formal 
Idealism, therefore, as a psychological theory, 
only brings to light such relations of man to 
his world, or more generally of mind to matter, 
as have been involved in the soldier's or the sol- 
dier-citizen's life since the opening of the Chris- 
tian era. 

Assuredly psychology would fail to be the 
science of self-expression, if in its history it 
did not reflect the history of religion. 



CHAPTER IX. 

IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 

PERHAPS the most severe criticism of For- 
mal Idealism, as defined in the foregoing 
chapters, is the criticism from history. Indeed, 
history is both its justification and its over- 
throw, since, as remarked before, it is found I 
formal only re'trospectively, that is, only as 
outgrown. The decline of supernaturalism, of 
militarism, of absolutism in all its forms, in 
short, of externalism or alien mediation, is his- 
tory's condemning criticism. And that phi- 
losophy of Schopenhauer's is a criticism also. 
One could hardly get a better definition of 
death than the doing of deeds or the conscious- 
ness of empty forms. The soldier's natural goal 
is death ; but history is dispensing with soldiers 
and using individually responsible laborers in- 
stead, and the change is bringing, among other 
things, a new psychology. 

What this new psychology has to think about 
the world of things we have seen already. 
Things are actually, substantially related, — re- 



112 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

lated in the way that makes the whole, to 
which they belong, a living organism. Also 
we have seen, although indirectly, what ideas 
are. We have seen what ideas are not. Now, 
however, we would take the direct view, and 
ask ourselves this question : If things are rela- 
tions, what positively are ideas? 

Whatever else may be said, ideas are states 
of consciousness, and some of the general 
characteristics of consciousness, that have been 
touched upon before, should be recalled. Con- 
sciousness was shown to be essential to a sub- 
stantial system of relations, being induced by 
the inherent self-activity. Thus every part 
of such a system, every part of an organism, 
must be subject to a relating activity, and 
must itself at the same time contribute to 
the activity, the subjection and the contri- 
bution being but incidents of the self-activity 
by which the organism as a whole is realized. 
This necessity, however, carries with it a tension, 
the tension of adjustment, since each part seeks 
to fulfil an individual adjustment to the whole, 
or the whole to express its organic nature 
in the part; and such tension is consciousness. 
Consciousness, then, is the tension of individual 
expression, — that is, of differentiation — that 
organic life must always induce. 



IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 113 

But if this be the nature of consciousness, it 
follows at once that the condition of being con- 
scious cannot possibly result from any peculiar 
power or property of any individual organ in 
an organism. The subjected and contributing 
part is not conscious in and of itself alone, as 
the Formal Idealist would have it. On the 
contrary, consciousness is an interactive func- 
tion or product, involving all parts. An organ- 
ism, then, as has been contended before, not 
any separate organ, is conscious ; and conscious 
within itself, not of anything external to it; and 
again, in and with its activity, not before nor 
yet after activity. Consciousness and activity, 
having the same basis, cannot be two. 

Ideas, accordingly, as states of consciousness, 
are dynamic. They are forces, not forms. In 
a similar sense, space has been said to be a 
force, not a form. The simplest idea that psy- 
chology has to deal with is the sensation. More 
complex ideas are the perception and the con- 
ception. First, however, of sensation. Partic- 
ular colors, tastes, sounds, smells, and the like 
are sensations ; and again and again these have 
been defined as the elements of knowledge, as 
only the material out of which mind builds its ex- 
periences ; but, apart from other equally serious 
objections, this definition does not accord with 



114 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the evidence of recent experiments. Mind does 
not build its objects out of sensations as "sim- 
ple ideas ; " but sensations are, in the first place, 
induced by the activity of mind, and are, in the 
second place, relationally one, not individually 
exclusive. The Law of Relativity, specially 
applicable to the sensuous consciousness, has 
been discussed already; and it is to be inter- 
preted as showing more than anything else that 
consciousness is vitally incident to a relating 
activity. The simple sensation, then, is not 
knowledge, in the sense of being an element; 
it is not in itself consciousness at all. What, 
then, is it? Why, there is no simple sensation. 
The sensation talked about is but an epistemolo- 
gist's abstraction or indirection for the source 
or basis of knowledge ; namely, for actual rela- 
tionship or organic activity. At times the epis- 
temologist, although throughout blinded into 
thinking of knowledge as a thing quite by itself, 
has got so far as to say that pure sensations 
were not knowledge themselves, but only the 
antecedent stimuli of the mind's life; but this, 
at best, is to go only half-way to the real truth. 
Sensation is real not even as external stimulus. 
Not we have sensations, whatever their function 
be said to be, but the consciousness of an organ- 
ism is sensuous. 



IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 115 

Higher in the scale are perceptions. These 
are commonly distinguished as the ideas of 
individual things, of single wholes, in the 
outer world. One perceives a chair, a book, a 
man; and each one of these perceptions com- 
prises a large complex of sensuous qualities, 
such as color and touch, but withal an ordered 
or relational or organic complex. The per- 
ceived world, as a whole, is the entire sphere 
of the consciousness of things in space, the 
world in general that we have about us with all 
its manifold parts. But ordered complexes 
correspond to co-ordinated activity. A free 
activity is only the realization of order; or, 
conversely, order is the possibility of freedom. 1 
For example, to be almost as commonplace as 
Aristotle, when he said that things were visible 
by reason of their visibility, only sitters per- 
ceive chairs, only readers are conscious of 
books, and in general only those who are able 
to move are aware of a world in space. The 
perceived world, then, in so far as a whole, in 
so far as having any fixity or permanence or 
order, in so far as real, is but consequent upon 
or correspondent to, if not indeed identical 
with, an acquired freedom of activity. The 
real perception is but the outer mark or the 
1 Cf. pp. 81-83. 



Il6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

language of a habit, since belief is never in 
anything that does not answer to some freedom 
of the self; or, again, wholeness or complete- 
ness or individuality can belong only to that 
which mediates activity. Not things, but 
tools — that is, real media of self-expression — 
are whole and individual ; and perception is of 
tools or media. 

But the perceived world in general is a broken 
whole, being made up of many wholes instead 
of being a single whole itself. It is compar- 
able with one's study, where books, papers, 
pictures, and pieces of furniture are more often 
the media of apparently separate activities than 
the single medium of one activity. The mul- 
tiplicity, however, or the differentiation, is not 
essential to the things themselves; and the 
activities, albeit apparently unrelated or ran- 
dom, are still those of a student seeking a 
realer expression of himself. The multiplicity 
is evidence or earnest of a single organizing 
activity quite as truly as of many separate 
activities. Indeed, as has been pointed out 
before, separation is indispensable to the action 
of an organism, and is even induced by it. 
There is no unity without plurality. In the 
study books and chairs and other things are 
properly distinguished only by a student, and 



IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. WJ 

in the general world of perception distinctions 
only mark the organic life, always with some 
struggle or tension, of an individual. 

But, further, every individual is one of the 
distinguished things. Even men are things, 
distinct from other men, or from animals or 
plants or clods of earth. True, a man has a 
greater individual power over nature than an 
animal or a clod, but this means no more and 
no less than that a man is the single organized 
activity of a larger, more complex group of 
things. A man is still a relational part of the 
whole. His greater power, instead of isolating 
him, only relates him more closely, and his 
activity only realizes him as an organ of the 
whole. It is to be remembered, moreover, that 
animals and plants and clods have their peculiar 
characters rather for him than in themselves. 

And, if perception is of the individual wholes 
of experience, of the wholes that mediate co- 
ordinated activity, conception is the organizing 
activity that underlies the differentiation of 
the wholes and seeks the fulfilment of their 
unity or relationship. A conception is thus 
rather an act than an object of consciousness. 
Unity, in fact, could never be anything else 
but an act. As an object in the ordinary sense, 
it is absolutely impossible. Perceptions are 



Il8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

objects only because of the conceptual activ- 
ity, the organizing activity, with which they 
are always in tension. Thus words are percep- 
tions from the standpoint of the activity that 
would reduce them to a complete sentence; and 
sentences from the standpoint of a relation in a 
still wider experience. But — and here is an 
important point — the two, perception and con- 
ception, are inseparable; nay, they are organi- 
cally one. Of course, conceptions have often 
been looked upon as distinct contents of mind, 
as independently real objects; but such a view 
of them, now quite out of the question, was nec- 
essary, only because mind was supposed to be 
something peculiar and apart, and unity, accord- 
ingly, to be extrinsic to the world of things. 
To-day conceptions may be called objective, 
but they are not objects. They are "spirit- 
ually " objective. 

The distinction between perception and con- 
ception is parallel to that, with which we 
have become familiar, between natural and 
social environment. Just as natural environ- 
ment is a social institution, so the world of 
perceptions is symbolic of conception, being 
the language or medium of the conceptual 
activity. Conception, in other words, is 
essentially a social function. And, to men- 



IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 1 19 

tion another circumstance not less significant 
to the lines of thought that have been pursued 
here, the three stages of knowledge, — sensa- 
tion, perception, and conception, — as they have 
usually been described, are not stages at all, 
but are organically one and so contemporaneous, 
being abstracted aspects of the organic whole, 
which mental life comprises. Sensations, as 
was asserted above, are induced by the very 
activity of mind, being under no conceivable 
circumstances the given elements or materials 
of mind's activity; and perceptions, in their 
turn, are incident to the tension in organic 
life, which is the activity of mind, between 
existing habits of action and the underlying 
relating activity, or, say, between unities and 
unity or organs and organism. 1 

Now do we see still more clearly, still more 
conclusively, that ideas, as mind's so-called 
objects, are forces, not forms. For the earlier 
psychology sensations were formal, because 
given elements of knowledge ; and perceptions, 
because of external things or wholes ; and con- 
ceptions, because of abstract universals: but 
psychology to-day finds them all organically 
one, and at the same time vitally incident to 

1 See " The Stages of Knowledge," in Psychological Review, 
March, 1897. 



120 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the activity of the self. They are, indeed, 
mind's; but mind is itself the substantial 
force, the dynamic reality, that a relational 
universe requires for its very integrity. 

In applying the term "force" to the idea, or 
to mind, we shall doubtless meet with hostile 
demonstrations from certain physical scientists. 
Still it is not impossible that physical science 
has been talking about forces without thinking 
very deeply about them. Certainly it seems 
rather strange for anybody to suppose that 
forces are material when no force was ever 
discovered that did not manifest, at least with 
some definiteness, a recognized law. The 
fact that forces are always lawful — else not 
discovered — ought to suggest either that they 
are not material or that matter is not what the 
abstracted scientist would have it. As a matter 
of truth, however, science has always been 
better than its language, really meaning by 
force the manifestation of an activity incident 
to the relations of things. Thus we are often 
told that heat expands and cold contracts; but 
we know, and those who tell us mean, that 
expansion is heat and that contraction is cold, 
or, more generally, that heat is only a mode of 
motion, motion itself being the expression and 
substantiation of existing relationship. Mat- 



IDEAS NOT FORMS BUT FORCES. 121 

ter, then, is not dynamic; only relationship is 
dynamic, unless matter itself be nothing but 
relationship; and forces are not material or 
abstractly physical, but are as psychical as 
ideas. Forces are themselves ideas, just as 
ideas are forces. Many pages ago ] this state- 
ment was made: "Not only are things related, 
but in them and of them exists a relating activ- 
ity, which is mind." By physical science the 
same mind is known as force. In the world as 
an organism, in a self-active system of actual 
relations, matter and mind are not two but one. 
Modern physics and modern chemistry, by their 
use of mathematical formulae, of curves and of 
figures of all sorts, have blown their physical 
elements, their molecules and their atoms, into 
absolute nothings, or rather into the most imagi- 
nary abstractions for something fundamentally 
different. 

Psychology, however, as we have seen, has 
experienced a similar explosion, and physical 
science and psychical science have proved to be 
only indirections for each other. The latter 
has studied the conscious self; the former, the 
changes in an outer world or not-self; but con- 
sciousness has proved to be intrinsic to the very 
process that has been found in the outer world, 
i Pp. 45 ff • 



122 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

Forces, as not blind, and ideas, as not formal, are 
identical ; and the sciences concerned with them 
are looking at the same reality, only from op- 
posite sides. Thus, they see action but from the 
opposites, force and law, and freedom but from 
the opposites, nature and will, and spirit but 
from the opposites, body and mind. Thinking 
of either one, of physical or of psychical science, 
and of its long and persistent abstraction, I 
seem to see a man standing with his back to a 
mirror and so unable to recognize himself, his 
own back, in the reflected image behind him. 
If only he would become less abstracted and 
turn around fairly and squarely; if only psy- 
chology and physical science would once for 
all face each other ! 

So, then, ideas are forces. A word, however, 
in popular discourse, expresses very well the 
true nature of an idea. The word is plan. Ideas 
are plans, and consciousness is always a plan- 
ning. As plans, ideas are sure to become 
motives, for they accompany and mediate, not 
a coming activity, but an already present activ- 
ity. As plans, then, ideas are forces. What 
is planning but a process wherein manifold 
things, of which the planner is himself one, as- 
sume such an expression of their relations as 
will set activity free? 



CHAPTER X. 

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. 

UNDER the control of a Dynamic Idealism 
educational methods must differ widely 
from what they are or have been under Formal 
Idealism. A few words, then, additional to 
what has been said incidentally already, in re- 
gard to the changes, cannot but be of some 
interest here, since they will at least serve the 
purposes of illustration. 

Consistent with Formal Idealism we have 
found (i) the pursuit of knowledge solely for 
knowledge's sake; (2) instruction in dead lan- 
guages, that is, in wholly abstract and unmean- 
ing media of expression; (3) preference either 
for principle-lessons or for pure object-lessons ; 
and (4) compulsion. In a word, under Formal 
Idealism, education is naturally a discipline, not 
an interest; a preparation for something else, 
not in itself a vocation. To see education in 
this light, however, is to imply that a change 
has already set in. Consciousness of the old 
comes only with the assertion of the new. In 



124 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

fact, consciousness — and this is but a sort of 
summary of the preceding chapter — sets the 
new free in the old. 

But, to put the new aside for a moment, and 
enlarge a little upon the old, knowledge for 
knowledge's sake as an ideal in school methods, 
carries with it the slavish use of single text- 
books, the cultivation of memory as a distinct 
and peculiarly valuable faculty, the evolution of 
teachers into military directors or masters of a 
routine, the resort to rewards and punishments, 
such as prizes, tasks, and the like, to secure 
attention, and the complete separation of bodily 
exercise and intellectual activity. Upon this 
general plan it is no wonder that in social life, 
in business, church, and state, the intellectual 
suicides are so numerous. Knowledge for 
knowledge's sake is bound to make stupid men. 

In a curriculum of dead languages a separa- 
tion of subjects is inevitable; and among these 
subjects, or among the men devoted to them, a 
competitive individualism is bound to prevail. 
In the competition, moreover, what above was 
referred to as the dead language of athletics 
has its perfectly natural and appropriate place. 
The body must be exercised, and Formal Ideal- 
ism finds no exercise of the body in the thought 
life, as well as no thought in the body life. 



ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. 125 

University faculties are often disturbed over 
the problem of requiring physical exercise, and 
of making this a recognized part of the prep- 
aration for a degree; but if they teach dead 
languages, and cherish isolated instead of organ- 
ized departments, and impose certain required 
courses of study, they have no reason to hesi- 
tate a moment. Compulsory gymnastics goes 
with compulsion in any other line. Legs and 
arms should be compelled to work as well as 
eyes and ears. 

Again, some of the noteworthy incidents of 
the compulsion that is natural to Formalism, 
are the following: (1) the tradition of a school- 
age, as if the child had no mind until reaching 
a certain year; (2) the subjection of all pupils 
to one line; (3) the measurement of work in 
terms of hours, weeks, and years; and (4) di- 
vision of the whole course into periods unrelated 
to each other, — as, for example, into the kinder- 
garten period, when the pupil plays ; the school 
period, when he laboriously accumulates facts 
and, as one has put it, learns how to learn ; and 
the university period, when, in spite of his long- 
induced blindness, he undertakes " original in- 
vestigations," at last learning or seeming to learn 
for himself. 

And, to conclude this account of the old in 



126 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

education, Formalism has naturally assumed that 
persons without the use of the organs of sight and 
hearing are not capable of education ; the other 
recognized senses — smell, taste, and touch — 
being supposed to have practically no intellec- 
tual value. Such an assumption, of course, is of 
a kind with the dogma that a thinker must know 
German, or that an author must read Greek, 
or that the reading of some particular book is 
necessary to culture. But the fact stands out 
clear to-day that sensation is not confined to 
the traditional five senses, nor intellect by any 
means to the two higher of them, sight and 
hearing. The remarkable success and the rapid 
development of schools for the blind and deaf 
signify the mistake and consequent decline of 
Formalism. A soldier's mind may be narrowed 
to eyes and ears, but not that of the modern 
laborer. 

Now, under Dynamic Idealism, which is the 
new, act-studies are the only natural ones. In 
act-studies there can be no confinement of the 
student's self. His education, narrowed to no 
particular organs, to no particular periods, to no 
particular subjects, is but a stimulation of his 
natural impulse to plan the liberation of his ac- 
tivity. Ideas that define to him the actual con- 
ditions of his natural expression, that are true 



ILLUSTRATIONS FROM EDUCATION. 12 J 

to him because setting him free, are the only- 
ideas that can be given him, because the only- 
ones that he will receive. 

To suppose the intention here to be to exalt 
the so-called technical schools, to make the 
schools of the mechanical arts the only com- 
mendable ones, is wholly to misunderstand what 
has been said. The meaning throughout has 
been, not that only the practical sciences, or so- 
called " arts," have worth, but that science in 
itself is practical, that theory should be recog- 
nized as often more practical than practice. 
The natural purpose of theory, whether in a 
university or in a technical school, is to save 
men from the retrogression that is always in- 
volved in being practical. Theory, as actually 
defining the conditions of real life, is practical 
in the extreme. Anything else, indeed, is not 
true theory, but sheer conventionalism busy- 
ing itself with intellectual gymnastics. The 
many dead languages that formalists study, 
the so-called " practical " men mechanically use. 
Dynamic Idealism, however, enjoins a more prac- 
tical study and a more theoretical use. 

The claim is often advanced that science for 
practical ends is inaccurate. The workman, it 
is said, is satisfied with a rule of thumb, while 
only the student feels the true worth of accu- 



128 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

racy. But how absurd such a contention as this 
is ! One needs only to work a little to find its 
folly. Success in work is always dependent 
upon accuracy. Free expression of self can- 
not be realized without it. Set a student to 
solve one of the old-time wall-paper problems 
in the old-time way, his book and its rules 
before him, and the chances are that he will 
make a mistake ; but give him a room to paper 
and make the labor also an intimate and organic 
part of some still larger interest, and accuracy 
will take care of itself. 

Present psychology, then, is simply insisting 
that education must find some way of applying 
in its methods the irrefutable fact that real 
knowledge is born and bred with action, interest 
being only in what one is doing, and ideas being 
only plans of the existing activity. 



CHAPTER XL 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 



" I ^HE division of the self into three parts, 
-*- body, mind, and soul, or the physical, the 
mental or rational, and the spiritual, can no 
longer escape our recognition and most careful 
consideration. The recent identification of force 
and idea, or matter and mind, as well as much 
in the earlier discussions, has made attention to 
the three parts of the self absolutely necessary. 
Without an explicit interpretation of the division, 
further progress in this study would be out of 
the question. 

The self has had three parts since the begin- 
ning of self-consciousness, and it is safe to say 
that the different parts have always been charac- 
terized in essentially the same ways. In current 
thought, particularly among more popular ideas, 
body is the composite, divisible, destructible, in 
which life may appear, but to which life is not 
intrinsic ; mind, quite distinct from body, is the 
law, universal and formal ; and soul is the sub- 
stantial, immaterial, and indivisible, free and in- 
9 



130 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

destructible, the source at once of the body's 
life and of the mind's will. This characterization, 
however, is only a restatement of the main 
doctrines of Formal Idealism, so that it must 
be greatly modified to be in line with more 
recent views. 

Historically we of the Christian era refer the 
view of the soul as simple and immaterial to the 
beginning of Christianity ; but also, as was 
shown above, Formal Idealism in its entirety 
takes the same reference. With the downfall of 
the civilizations about the Mediterranean, with 
the decay of social life and individual character, 
with the decline of long-cherished institutions, 
religious and political, in short, with the decom- 
position that had infected human affairs on 
every side, there seemed to be possible no other 
conception of the world and its manifold interests 
than that of unsubstantially, divisibility, destruc- 
tibility. For reality, accordingly, men had to 
look somewhere else, off in another world, the 
complete negation of this one, a world immaterial 
and eternal ; and to this other world was supposed 
to belong a corresponding other part of the self, 
also immaterial and eternal. Even Plato in his 
day had felt this movement in human thought. 
Thus, he proved the soul's immortality through 
an insistence on the natural permanence of the 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 131 

simple or indivisible. That which has parts can 
perish, he said in so many words ; but the soul is 
without parts, one and indivisible. Still Chris- 
tianity gave the supreme emphasis to Plato's 
idea, proclaiming the existence and permanence 
of the indivisible, placing it in another world, 
and isolating man from his living self so long as 
he remained in this. The Christian proclamation 
also made mind or knowledge formal, and so 
arbitrary, and body a negation at once of mind 
and of soul. Body was a negation of mind in 
so far as composite, and of soul in so far as 
mortal or unsubstantial. 

But the separation of body and mind and 
soul only shows a misunderstanding, as it were 
a hasty judgment, of what composition and 
decomposition are ; and the history of Christian- 
ity is a slow but certain correction of the 
misconception. The antithesis of the compos- 
ite and the simple has a much deeper, yes, a 
much more spiritual meaning than that of an 
absolute division of the self. True, the com- 
posite may decompose, but decomposition is 
nothing more nor less than the differentiation 
that an activity, fulfilling something in the 
very nature of the parts themselves, induces. 
Decomposition is the unmistakable sign of 
organic life, that is to say, of the change that 



132 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

we have found natural in a world of substantial 
relations. Accordingly, instead of testifying to 
the reality of a life apart from what is found 
to be composite, it is a mark of a life, simple 
and abiding, that claims even decomposition for 
its own ; and this life, in and of the composite, 
is the Soul. 

The ancient civilization crumbled as the mod- 
ern arose, the passing of the one finding its 
inner interpretation in the building of the other. 
In individual activity, moreover, essentially the 
same stages and phases of experience that are 
disclosed in history are manifest. No individ- 
ual ever fully expresses himself without making 
his past composite. The decomposition, or 
disintegration, is necessary, in order that the 
act itself, as an organic adjustment to the differ- 
ent present, may be liberated. All expression 
demands or involves a constant rearrangement 
of its incidents, a reorganization of its medium, 
and the rearrangement makes " decay." Natur- 
ally enough, too, the agent at a certain moment 
in the process takes the negation, that the decay 
implies, literally. He sees it as an absolute 
negation, and feels in consequence an isolation 
from himself, a complete division of himself. 
As has been suggested, Christianity came when 
the feeling of isolation was very general. The 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 133 

negation, however, is not literal. Life is in 
very truth the deeper meaning of death. 

In practice the isolation of the parts of the 
self has the effect of turning the body into a 
mere mechanism, into a system of parts only 
formally related and so without activity of its 
own, and also, not now to speak specially of 
mind, of turning the soul into an arbitrary 
agent, which through an absolute will commu- 
nicates movement to an otherwise helpless body. 
A society of selves so transformed becomes a 
material body, too, a mechanical whole, subject 
to an arbitrary will, which resides in such an 
individual or in such individuals as can exercise 
the most physical force. Of course arbitrary 
will is only another name for physical force. 
Where will is arbitrary, as always when belong- 
ing to an isolated soul, might makes right. 
But the body, individual or politic, turned into 
a mere mechanism, becomes in reality but one 
part among many of the whole material world, 
so that the change, with its accompanying with- 
drawal of the self, is in point of fact a way of 
expressing more fully the part's relation to the 
whole. The separation, then, brings complete 
identification. The arbitrary control, or as the 
same thing the subjection of the body to the 
play of physical forces, there being no activity 



134 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

possible to the body from within, really does 
but liberate a fulfilling activity. In fact, too, 
the apparently deserted body moves to its ac- 
tivity by no means so aimlessly and irrespon- 
sibly as has often been supposed ; the control of 
its movements has been by no means so exter- 
nal and arbitrary. Arbitrary control is only 
another name for subjective indifference, and 
indifference is a very distinct, a very positive 
form of will. The abstraction of self, to which 
the indifference is due, is a complete sanction 
of the force and arbitrariness; or, in other 
words, the force itself is the real soul or spirit. 
Instead of being two things, then, force and 
spirit, body and soul, are one. Imperial Rome 
was founded upon their unity, and individual 
experience relies upon it. 

That the two, even while they seem opposite, 
are really one, is shown by the outcome of 
their opposition. With the ensuing activity, 
whether produced by the will of indifference or 
produced by external force, the supposedly 
isolated self returns to the medium of its ex- 
pression, finding itself, after all, not the negation 
of its body, but the deeper affirmation of it, the 
fulfilling essence of it. Thus, politically, mili- 
tarism or social mechanicalism and supernatur- 
alism have together been but the forerunners of 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 35 

a democratic industrialism and naturalism ; and, 
psychologically, sensationalism and intuitional- 
ism have preceded a dynamic relationism. Both 
politically and psychologically the spiritual has 
returned to this world, as the Prophet of Chris- 
tianity in his own person predicted it would. 

How now to distinguish body and mind and 
soul, if they are not three separate selves, may 
seem to some a serious problem ; but the dis- 
tinctions are simple enough. Body, as distinct, 
is only an abstraction for the self's manifoldness 
or differentiation; mind, for the unity of the 
self; and soul, for the substantial reality. The 
manifold is at bottom the relational and dy- 
namic, and its relational character is mind, while 
the dynamic character is soul. The self has a 
soul because self-active. Were body merely 
composite, its parts being only formally related, 
then life and soul would not be intrinsic to it, 
and decomposition would be absolute death ; 
but body is organic. Life, then, is a property 
of it Moreover, the criteria of life, peculiar 
property of body, and of consciousness, pecu- 
liar to mind, and of substantiality, peculiar to 
soul, are absolutely the same. Where any one 
is, there also are the other two. At the very 
beginning of this book, 1 where the self was 
1 P. 16. 



136 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

variously defined, now as a defined force, now 
as an animate intelligence, and now as a re- 
sponsible agent, the unity of the three parts of 
the self was involved. Here, however, the self's 
unity is made quite explicit. 

To the theories of evolution or to biological 
science generally this fundamental conception of 
Dynamic Idealism — namely, the conception of 
the unity of body, mind, and soul — cannot but 
be very welcome. Still there are many scientists 
even to-day who, in spite of their avowed hos- 
tility to the theological dogma of another world 
or of an isolated selfhood, have retained the very 
standpoint to which they object. Witness such 
assertions as the following, sometimes made di- 
rectly and openly, sometimes only implied : — 

(a) The environment to which organic life 
seeks adjustment is essentially alien, adjustment 
being secured to it only by chance, which, 
plainly, is the scientist's substitute for miracle or 
external mediation, and continued only by the 
habit of literal repetition, the substitute for 
ritual or cult. Before adjustment the organism 
is in itself a mere trembling, unguided life, a 
mass of random impulses, in short, not an organ- 
ism at all and certainly not alive; and after 
adjustment it leads a life not naturally its own, 
in fact, a life of another world. 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 137 

(b) The process of evolution has a creative 
power of its own, soul as something quite differ- 
ent being evolved from matter, or again con- 
sciousness as a distinct and novel function 
appearing at a certain particular time in the 
process of growth and self-consciousness, also 
distinct and novel, at a later time, and, accord- 
ing to some, God-consciousness or " cosmic " 
consciousness at a time later still. Obviously 
this differs from theological creationism only in 
placing matter temporally before soul or mind 
instead of after. The isolation of the parts of 
the self is not less final in the " scientific " than 
in the theological conception. Both are dual- 
istic, formalistic, supernaturalistic. 

(c) Inheritance is of acquired characters ; or, 
as one might very well put it, inheritance is 
literal. This doctrine, -not now so popular as 
formerly, but still in question, plainly involves 
an isolation of the self from itself, for it is funda- 
mentally deterministic. It is quite in accord 
with the view that environment is alien, and that 
adjustments are continued through the habit of 
literal repetition. Under its sway the evolu- 
tional series would have to be in parts differing 
in kind, since difference on any other plan would 
be out of the question. Inheritance of acquired 
characters means caste in nature quite as con- 



138 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

clusively as it means caste in human society; 
and the three principal castes that it has de- 
termined are those that correspond to the three 
parts of the self, — the physical, the intelligent, 
and the spiritual. 

{d) The group, or class, is a community, hav- 
ing a basis of union that is independent of the 
differences in the individual members. This 
means, of course, that types are persistent or 
immutable; and it is plainly of a piece with the 
other doctrines mentioned here, — with envi- 
ronment as alien and with adjustment as secured 
by chance or miracle and continued by mere 
repetition, with creation or evolution as sudden 
or arbitrary, and with inheritance as literal. 

In these ways, then, among many others, 
science has taken to itself the very standpoint 
against which it is supposed to have reacted. 
Perhaps, however, reaction always requires a 
counter-reproduction of what has offended ; but, 
be that as it may, science at the present time 
appears to be quite as much at war with itself 
as with theology, for from many sides it is all 
but ready to declare that environment is not 
alien but natural, being vitally one with the 
organism or self, and that both a habit of literal 
repetition and an inheritance of acquired char- 
acters are impossible, adjustments being con- 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 39 

tinued by an organic expression that involves 
change, and that causation is rather a matter of 
interaction than of creative action or independ- 
ent reaction, and, finally, that the group is a 
single, living organism, not a community. 
Science, accordingly, as was said above, can- 
not but welcome the conclusion of psychology, 
as here presented in the name of Dynamic 
Idealism, that body and mind and soul are one, 
not three. This unity is itself the inner 
meaning of the rising scientific conceptions. 

But there remains for consideration here a 
very important doctrine. Perhaps it should be 
called a belief; but, whatever we call it, the 
immortality of the soul is an essential part of 
human consciousness, and although the conser- 
vation of matter and the eternity of truth have 
long been positive convictions among men, the 
soul's immortality has been, and is still com- 
monly supposed to be, impossible without a 
complete independence both of body and of 
mind. In the face of this supposition, what 
can we say? 

Two things can be said very promptly. In 
the first place, science has been in error, and 
in some measure at least has confessed itself 
so, whenever it has assumed that matter as 
conserved and matter as a distinct substance, 



140 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

abstractly physical, were ideas that could stand 
together; and, in the second place, the reli- 
gious consciousness has been in error, whenever 
it has allowed itself to think that individuality 
was solely an affair of physical determinations. 
A conserved matter is force, not matter, and it 
has come to be so recognized. The doctrine 
of material conservation never really referred to 
the constancy of a sum of any observed parts of 
the physical world, but only to that of the sum 
of the world's parts in the abstract. With 
this latter reference, however, it has been 
nothing but an indirection for the fact that 
parts are relations and that relationship is 
dynamic; it has been simply a blind way of 
admitting to one's thought about the world the 
intelligence and the spiritual substantiality of 
matter, or to give even another name, a secret 
door for escape from dualism or a physical sub- 
stitute for soul or mind. And, on the side of 
the religious consciousness, a disposition to in- 
direction and substitution is not less apparent. 
Religion also has had its secret way out of 
dualism, its hidden door in the panelling of its 
sanctuary. Thus, bodily isolation as the mark 
of individuality and immortality as dependent 
upon absolute separation from the physical are 
but counterparts of the scientist's doctrines that 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 141 

matter is a separate substance, and that it is 
conserved in its sum total; and just as the con- 
servation saves matter from being abstractly 
physical, so the immortality saves individuality 
from being limited to an isolated body. If 
conservation is a physical, then immortality is 
a spiritual, indirection for the fact that bodies, 
or parts, or, in general, that individuals, are 
not mere component elements but relations. 
In short, conserved matter and immortal soul 
are one and the same reality; or, as doctrines, 
one and the same truth. A conserved matter 
is not abstractly physical, and an immortal soul 
is not abstractly spiritual ; but both are ways — 
each one of which supports and corrects the 
other — of recognizing that in its relational or 
organic character both the universe as a whole 
and the individuality that relationship involves 
are substantial and abiding. Relationships, 
not bodies, are immortal ; and what is any one 
of us, as an individual, but a relation? 

Now, reducing the foregoing to a simple 
sum, we get the following. Were the material 
composite, the immortal would have to be 
immaterial, since decomposition in the material 
would necessarily bring death ; but the material 
is in reality organic, as both science and the- 
ology have indirectly conceded, and decompo- 



142 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

sition, accordingly, is a mark of continued 
life. In the sense, then, of matter as organic, 
a sense in which the physical and the rational 
and the spiritual are one, the soul is both 
material and immortal, or immortal because 
material. The composite must die, but organ- 
ism never dies. Individual organs, too, as 
mere physical parts, are constantly passing 
away, but not as relations. The organic is 
immortal, even under Plato's standards, since 
it is simple and indivisible; but it is simple and 
indivisible, not in the sense of a direct negation 
of the divisible, but in the sense of unity or sim- 
plicity as real through difference and division, 
that is, in the deeper sense that identifies the 
part and the whole, the many and the one. 

Certain recent biologists have also said that 
organism never dies; and although they have 
been thinking of particular very minute forms, 
so minute in fact as to have only a hypothetical 
existence, yet their teachings have implied the 
same notion of immortality as has been offered 
here. They have but confused the immortality 
of a hypothetical part with that of what such a 
part really stands for in their own theories, the 
organism as a whole in its essential character. 
Their immortal form is only a physical abstrac- 
tion for the immortality of the organic. Less 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 143 

perhaps than any other " objective " science is 
biology hampered by the assumption that real- 
ity is composite, or, as the other side of this 
assumption, that unity is external to things; but 
even biology has been making obviously wrong 
uses of division, expecting quantitative or physi- 
cal analysis to pass for qualitative analysis. Not, 
then, until it is ready to look to the whole, in- 
stead of to the minute part, for the " vital unit," 
or at least to see the whole in the part that it hy- 
pothetically talks about, can it even hope to find 
any satisfactory solutions of its many problems. 
But as to immortality in Relationism or Dy- 
namic Idealism, we have not found the denial 
that at first thought might have been expected. 
Dynamic Idealism, although identifying matter 
and spirit, still holds that the individual, in re- 
spect to just that which makes him substantial, 
in respect to his relationship, is immortal. The 
individual's immortality, however, is not in a life 
in some other place ; it is not, as some Chris- 
tians still imagine, in a Heaven located they 
know not where, nor, as metempsychosis has 
put it, in other unsuspected parts of the known 
universe ; it does not depend at all upon a mere 
change of place. Instead of being an escape, 
complete or partial, from this world's responsi- 
bilities, it is the ever-deepening expression of 



144 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

ever-present relations, of an ever-assertive char- 
acter. In certain respects metempsychosis is 
a more inspiring conception of immortality than 
complete translation; but, after all, its diffi- 
culties to the thinker are not essentially differ- 
ent. Thus, from the start it presupposes an 
absolute separation of soul and body, and it 
assumes that individuality is physically deter- 
mined, death consisting in passing from one 
particular body to another wholly distinct. Its 
inspiring character consists in its implied asser- 
tion that the soul has a real and final depend- 
ence, if not upon a body, at least upon body 
as such. In human history, too, metempsy- 
chosis, in one form and another, has been 
taught, when such movements as distant coloni- 
zation and as far-reaching conquest have been 
going on; and although these movements may 
seem to be only the passing of an unchanging 
character, national or individual, from one place 
to another, or the subjection of a peculiar life to 
altogether new ways and new institutions, still 
underneath, as every thoughtful historian to-day 
is convinced, the new life is but a natural out- 
come, a true realization of the force or motive 
in the old. 1 What was said of travel pages ago 

1 In another book, in many ways supplementary to this 
one, I have undertaken to interpret history in the way sug- 



BODY, MIND, SOUL. 1 45 

can be said here of metempsychosis, or of col- 
onization or conquest. It is only " the fulfil- 
ling expression of already existing relations ; " 
it is a staying at home even while one moves 
away, a freedom even at the time of subjec- 
tion, a being here even in passing yonder. 
And the same must be said also, by way 
of interpretation, even of the Christian's im- 
mortality. The Kingdom of Heaven is here 
and now. Immortality is as much before death 
as after it. The real self is in a natural, an 
original adjustment to the true sphere of its 
activity. 

The primary purpose of this chapter, how- 
ever, was not to discuss immortality, but to 
define precisely and explicitly the unity of 
body, mind, and soul, which had been such an 
important implication in all that had preceded. 
The question of immortality forced itself upon 
us because it was necessary to meet the most 
serious objection that could possibly be raised 
to the discovered union. So now, having met 
the objection, we find, in summary of the main 
discussion of the chapter, that body is the 
relational as manifold, and mind the relational 

gested here. See "Citizenship and Salvation, or Greek and 
Jew : A Study in the Philosophy of History." Little, Brown 
& Co., 1897. 



I46 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

as one, and soul the relational as substantial. 
In these characterizations the three so-called 
parts of the self are made absolutely one. ' In 
the relational as the organic the three are one. 1 

1 In an appendix to this chapter, beginning on page 227, I 
have given in outline a special study of the subject of immor- 
tality. In regard to this subject interest is always so keen, 
and the danger of misunderstanding is so great, that it seemed 
altogether desirable to present a second treatment, complete in 
itself and formally independent of that in the text. 



CHAPTER XII. 

TIME. 

THE recent discussion of immortality, or of 
the relation of body, mind, and soul, 
has of course implied a very definite doctrine of 
time, so that the transition from the previous 
chapter to the present one will not seem 
sudden. 

Dualism and its blood-relation Formalism 
have no choice but to regard time, like space, 
as a form in which the consciousness of things, 
and particularly the consciousness of self, occur. 
They see the past and the future as literally here- 
tofore and hereafter, respectively, the different 
parts of time being absolutely distinct. For 
them, both as to its wholeness and as to its 
parts, time is quite external to the content of 
consciousness. But Relationism, able to say, 
as we have seen, that the hereafter is also here, 
has a widely different view. Relationism finds 
time as well as space dynamic, believing it to 
be involved in the process to which the events 



I48 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

in it belong, and so to be something more than 
a sum of unrelated periods or than a single 
very long period for the mere reception of 
events from without. Many people, it is true, 
seem often to live as if events were only in 
time, what is past and what is future having 
nothing at all to do with what is present ; but 
such people have no real time-consciousness. 
Really to be conscious of time is to use time, to 
live with it as well as in it; and a used time is 
certainly not formal. The human machine — 
that is to say, the poor slavish official, whose 
activity is rather another's than his own — lives 
in time and without any consciousness of it ; or, if 
he be conscious of it, he is so because some 
interest of his own conflicts with that of his 
employer. In such a consciousness, however, 
he is using time as means to an end ; and, in 
general, for the active self time is one of the 
resources applied to the end of self-expression, — 
so to speak, one of the things done. A lived 
time, a used time, is obviously dynamic. 

But a good deal more than this needs to be 
said; for so much is hardly satisfactory, even 
if its meaning be at once apparent. We must 
therefore turn to psychology, which has busied 
itself a good deal with certain facts about time 
and our consciousness of it. These facts will 



TIME. 



149 



all be found to be strong witnesses against the 
dualistic or formalistic doctrines. 

As straws telling the direction of the wind, 
there are the recognized dependence of the 
consciousness of time on rhythm, and the sim- 
ple circumstance that memory is only a special 
way of viewing some present condition or dis- 
turbance. But of peculiar interest and value 
are the following paradoxes : (1) the real, the ex- 
perienced present is the sum of two unrealities, 
a little past and a little future; (2) an empty 
time is no time; (3) a filled time is timeless; 
and (4) an explained series in time — that is, an 
explained history or an explained evolution — 
is no longer a series. These paradoxes, to 
which in order our attention now turns, will 
all prove to mean the same thing, as if they 
were four roads leading to Rome. 

The interval of time known as present or 
now must, strictly speaking, be in itself a zero, 
having no duration at all. The now or present, 
in other words, is not a part of time, even as a 
mere point is not a part of space. Conscious- 
ness, however, recognizes a present, which by 
some writers has been styled the " specious " 
present, including a little past and a little fu- 
ture. Hence the paradox that the present, real 
to consciousness, is the sum of two unrealities. 



150 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

But the meaning of this is, in the now well- 
worn phrase, that time is not composite but 
relational. Thus, in view of the relational char- 
acter, past and future have to be parts of the 
present; which is only another way of saying 
that time is nothing if apart from the things 
in it, since the things refuse to be isolated from 
each other. Some experimental psychologists 
have been thoughtful or foolish enough to 
measure the "specious" present, finding its 
length to vary from four or five to as many 
even as twelve seconds ; but the " specious " 
present is something other than a quantity. 
Every activity has its now, or present, the 
length of which is determined by the degree 
in which the means to the action are organized 
for realization of the end. The absolute now 
would be the present of any perfectly organized 
act, and all eternity of the complete activity of 
which any act is a relational part. The con- 
scious self, furthermore, always has a past and 
a future, for the simple reason that by dint of 
its consciousness, by dint of the tension of its 
organic activity, it is always identifying itself 
with some single partial phase of its life instead 
of with the whole ; but nevertheless the whole 
is always active, and both past and future 
accordingly are real in the present. Experi- 



TIME. 



151 



mentalists have limited the present of con- 
sciousness to a few seconds, because they have 
limited the self to some very simple separate 
activity. 

The statement, made above, that the absolute 
now is the present of a perfectly organized activ- 
ity leads directly to the paradoxes about an 
empty time and a filled time. An organized 
activity, wherein means and end are become 
so perfectly adjusted as to have realized their 
identity, the end seeming no longer external to 
the means but fulfilment of them, may be viewed 
in two ways, — either from the standpoint of one 
of the many minor component activities, or from 
the standpoint of the single whole as an undi- 
vided and henceforth indivisible activity; and, 
if from the former, it will be in a filled time, 
while from the latter it will be in an empty time. 
Thus, again, time is filled, and then timeless, 
when everything to be done is being done; and 
empty, and then not time, when there is nothing 
further to be done. The state of the skilful work- 
man, unhesitatingly pursuing some goal, doing 
now this thing, now that, but knowing intuitively 
the relation of every act to every other, illus- 
trates the first case; and the state of rest, of 
sound sleep, fairly illustrates the second. Free 
activity, in fine, both as an acquisition and as 



152 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

an instinct, quite transcends the distinctions of 
time-duration. 

The returned wanderer, so often appealed to 
for illustration of the nature of the time-con- 
sciousness, looks at his old home, not seen for 
years, and exclaims, " But yesterday I was a 
careless boy among these hills ; " and then, 
after reflecting a little, recalling what has inter- 
vened, " What long, long years have passed 
away since I left this quiet, simple home ! " 
The time is as nothing, until the events crowd 
in one after another, and then it lengthens into 
years, its length being a sort of measure of the 
contrast between the old state and the new. 
But, finally, reflection reaches a third stage, 
and we hear the wanderer exclaim : " And 
yet, though different, I am, after all, the same. 
Throughout, my life has been but one life. The 
boy I was then I am now. Time only fulfils, 
it does not change. Past and future are but one 
abiding present." For the wanderer, as for our 
science, an empty time and a filled time are 
timeless, and past and future are always in the 
present. 

Time as filled is a time in which all the con- 
tained events are so fully organized or related 
as to be the immediate incidents of a single 
life or a single activity; and, now to touch 



TIME. 153 

briefly upon the fourth paradox, the study of 
history or of any process or evolution is fairly 
describable as a time-filling pursuit, the many 
discovered events being made only the related 
parts of one event. Until the filling is accom- 
plished, until the many are seen as one, the 
history or process is a broken series, with past, 
present, and future more or less isolated from 
each other ; but so soon as the filling or the 
unification is complete, so soon, in short, as the 
series is explained, there seems to be no his- 
tory. Of course, were the studied series ever 
literally broken and composite, being without 
any relating unity, there could be no student 
of it, no historian ; and, as for our own day, 
historians and evolutionists appear to be hav- 
ing the very rich concluding experience of the 
returned wanderer, for whom past and future 
disappeared in an all-containing present. 

Furthermore, to approach the fact before us 
from a somewhat different point of view, as a 
history completes itself, reaching its final ex- 
planation, the sequence of its events is found 
to have complete expression in the different 
coexisting phenomena of the present. The 
stages, so long referred to the past, as they are 
seen more deeply, — that is, with reference to 
what is real or essential in them, — prove to be 



154 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

but actual phases of the present, the life seen in 
history to be but the fuller life of the present. 
Biology, as if finding a material expression of 
this truth, has had a doctrine of recapitulation, 
wherein a present form is seen to pass through 
many, if not all, of the stages of its evolution. 
Still this special doctrine only partially or dis- 
tantly illustrates the principle here in question, 
for biological recapitulation is neither complete 
nor literal. Perfect illustration could be only 
where the recapitulated stages were absolutely 
coexistent, since, if itself seen in time, the 
recapitulation cannot possibly appear literal. 
Only as we view an organism for what it now 
is, not for the different things it has been, can 
we find it literally a fulfilment of the past. 

In the prevalent conviction that what first 
was is now and is the very essence, the organiz- 
ing principle, of the present, we have a hint of 
what time must be. One's remotest past is only 
one's deepest nature now, and the many monu- 
ments of one's past, fully interpreted, properly 
related, are the manifold aspects of one's pres- 
ent. " The history of all things, that am I," 
the thinker has sooner or later to say ; " its 
stages mediate my life to-day." 

Mathematics, in its doctrine of motion, in its 
formulae descriptive of motion, really identifies 



TIME. 155 

sequences and coexistences. It gets at the 
identification, to be sure, through reducing 
time, which is pure sequence, and space, which 
is pure coexistence, to infinites or infinitesimals, 
in which motion is also rest; but these useful 
conceptions of mathematics are only hypotheti- 
cal quantities, or quantitative abstractions, for 
relationship or organic character, and within the 
organic change is also permanence, or sequence 
is coexistence. The mathematician's infinity, 
then, is at bottom a case of organic recapitula- 
tion ; and parenthetically, to connect the present 
with the past of this book, recapitulation means 
both original life, or original adjustment, and 
immortality. The self that is, both was and 
will be. 

So, now to repeat, with a view to the evidence 
of the four paradoxes and of what has been 
said in the discussion of them, time is essentially 
dynamic, being not a form of life or of con- 
sciousness, but a vital, organic incident of it. 
Time is something used in organic life, not 
something in which organisms live. It is the 
relational in so far as this involves unrest, 
change, difference. And, in conclusion, that 
time is inseparable from space has been indi- 
cated in the identity of the present and the 
coexistent. Space is the coexistent, or the re- 



156 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

lational as abiding and homogeneous. The 
sequent and the coexistent, however, the chang- 
ing and the abiding, are one, even as sub- 
ject and object, or part and whole, are one. 
Or, again, the unity of space and time is shown 
in the fact that each is in itself an abstraction 
for something in the other. Thus, space were 
not space without motion, and time were not 
time without rest; and time is an abstraction 
for motion, space for rest. The mathematician, 
already appealed to, goes a long way toward 
showing what space and time both are, when 
he gets his concept of force, or at least of 
mechanical movement, from their identity. As 
space is the present of time, so time is the else- 
where of space ; and both, simply because of 
this interdependence, are in themselves rela- 
tional, dynamic, inseparable from the things in 
them, intrinsic to the changing permanence, 
or moving rest of the organic. 1 

1 It would be interesting to apply the doctrine of time here 
presented to the problems of memory and retention. Plainly 
memory cannot be of the past for itself alone, of the past as 
literally past, for memory cannot possibly be an isolated 
faculty of mind ; and retention cannot be explained by any 
storehouse theory of mind, or by any hypothesis of scars on 
the brain, or of habits of repetition, or of an all-powerful un- 
consciousness back of consciousness. What memory and re- 
tention are, however, cannot be discussed here at any length. 
Only it is plain that their nature is very definitely implied in 



TIME. 157 

that of change and time. That which changes also always is ; 
and memory, accordingly, coming in the wake of change, must 
be as much of the present as of the past, or let us say that it 
must be of the past made contemporary- The fact already 
casually referred to, of memory's dependence on present con- 
ditions, is all that the psychologist needs for the basis of a 
theory, if he will only remember that those present conditions 
are only relational parts of a whole. And, as to retention, in 
that changing thing which also abides both the forgotten past 
can be recalled and the unseen future can be revealed. Both 
the recall and the revelation will be as natural as the change 
itself. What the change needs will come of itself. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

a summary: dynamic vs. formal idealism. 

PERHAPS a summary in this place is un- 
necessary, but aside from its possible 
value to somebody there are certain points in 
the foregoing that may well be emphasized by 
repetition, and others that having been given no 
direct recognition can now be made explicit. 

The simple statement that ideas are not 
forms but forces is a statement that in itself 
summarizes all that has been said ; but involved 
in it are many other not-buts, 1 which I would 
bring together here, passing some with mention 
only, and in regard to others even adding a 
greater or less amount to the expositions 
already given. The many different phases, psy- 
chological, physiological, sociological, and 
even theological, of the opposition between 

1 For this coined word I offer my apologies. No doubt 
others will fail to find its use justified by the fact that I have 
imagined it very apt, but I let it stand. It seems apt to me, 
not only as a name of a form of sentence, but also as a sign 
of an attitude of mind valuable to the development of thought. 
It faces the fact of the dependence of thought on negation. 



DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. 1 59 

Formal Idealism and Dynamic Idealism cer- 
tainly ought to be seen clearly and so far as 
possible all at once. So, to begin : — 

{a) Matter and mind are not two but one, 
mind being the relationship or the relating 
activity in matter. Indeed, as was said re- 
cently of space and time, each of the two is only 
an abstraction for something essential in the 
other. Matter as organic is intelligent, and 
mind as dynamic is material or substantial. 
Under Dualism or Formalism, which is dual- 
ist ic, matter cannot be essentially organic nor 
mind naturally active or executive. 

(b) Soul, the spiritual as distinct both from 
the physical and from the rational self, is 
neither the negation of body nor the negation 
of mind, but the fulfilling organic activity, or 
the substance, in which an organic matter and 
a dynamic mind are one. Matter, then, has 
soul, because not formally but actually rela- 
tional; and mind has soul, because not arbitra- 
rily but responsibly or naturally executive. 

(c) Immortality is not a life yonder in an 
hereafter, but the life here and now. Individ- 
uality survives decomposition because it is not 
involved in a unity of the merely composite, 
but in relationship, which is substantial. 

(d) Adjustment, which may fairly be taken 



l6o DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

as a biological term for the life hereafter, is 
not acquired but original, environment being 
natural, not alien, and the self or organism 
related, not isolated. The inheritance, too, 
involved in adjustment, is not literal but rela- 
tional; and the habit, not mere repetition but 
organic expression. Of course, as the terms 
are commonly used, inheritance expresses the 
parent's adjustment in the offspring, and habit 
in the parent's own life; but the difference is 
essential only if one finds individuality in mere 
physical or bodily limitations. For the or- 
ganic whole to whose life parent and offspring 
alike owe their individuality, inheritance and 
habit are one. 

(e) The self is not a localized entity, in but 
not of the body, but a functional activity. 
Whether we think of the self as soul or as mind, 
its localization in the brain or in any other 
part is unthinkable. The character alone of 
the so-called sensuous consciousness, which can 
no longer be confined to special organs, is 
hostile to localization. Dualism, however, re- 
quires localization. Dualism leads to a mo- 
narchical despotism in the relation of the parts 
of the body, as well as in the relation of the 
parts of society. This social analogy, too, may 
be carried even farther, since in the still dual- 



DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. l6l 

istic hypothesis of separate sense-organs or 
of "idea-centres" or little brains existing in 
different parts of the body, a psychological feu- 
dalism is presented. Idealism and Materialism 
have had their different ways of expressing 
feudalism, but both have expressed it. While 
one has thought of the brain and the subor- 
dinate ganglia as mere temporal thrones from 
which both an intellectual and a spiritual 
authority were exercised, the other has thought 
of them as generating a peculiar force, or in 
interpreting the " reactions " of the body has 
treated them as arbitrary, or has, in other words, 
regarded the reactive effects as external results 
of the causes. "Peculiar force," however, and 
" temporally enthroned authority " mean the 
same thing. 

(/) The mental faculties are not many but 
one. Not to touch upon other divisions of 
the mind, it is still the fashion to separate 
thought and sensation, the former being mind 
as self-conscious or the consciousness of ideas, 
and the latter being mind as conscious of the 
not-self, being so to speak a mere conscious- 
ness of matter. But the Law of Relativity, 
without other help, destroys this dualism at a 
stroke. 

(g) Ideas are not innate, but actually, vitally 



1 62 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

mediative. Formal ideas, the ideas of a sepa- 
rate, immaterial mind, could not but be innate ; 
given to experience instead of belonging to it. 
Also, as indicated now so many times, innate 
ideas, or formal ideas, are naturally expressed 
in a lifeless medium, a dead language; and 
under the dualistic position both thought and 
sensation are of given or eternally fixed ideas 
expressed in a non-mediative because alien 
medium. Matter, of course, is the alien 
medium of sensation. John Locke's sensations 
as "simple ideas," although set up against 
Descartes' innate ideas, in being given, fixed, 
and evident-of-an-wholly-external-something 
were as innate as ideas ever could be. Even 
abstract materialism is nativistic, for in its 
notions of space and time and force and matter 
it subjects the changes of natural life to certain 
external forms. Relationism, however, knows 
no ideas which are not vitally mediative, or 
the medium of whose expression is not itself 
alive. For Relationism ideas are not enslaving 
forms, but liberating plans; their truth being 
of the kind that really sets you free. 

(k) Consciousness is never epiphenomenal, 
but, even like the ideas belonging to it, always 
mediative; never merely ornamental, but always 
useful. This not-but is only a repetition of the 



DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. 1 63 

one preceding it, but by its particular form it 
leads to several considerations of importance. 
That under Dualism consciousness must be epi- 
phenomenal is now an old story; but certain 
comparative psychologists, as if holding too 
literally to the old definition of man as a 
rational being, have saved to man a mediative 
consciousness, but condemned the animals, 
which are said to be wholly creatures of sense, 
to an epiphenomenal consciousness. They 
have, then, made man's reason mediative by 
making man himself an epiphenomenon in the 
world. But in this procedure they are han- 
dling a boomerang. Only men, they contend, 
know relations, while animals know only things ; 
but, in point of fact, things are relations, and 
there is no such knowledge of relations as they 
would have. Relations are actual, not formal, 
(z) Self-consciousness is not of any subjec- 
tive entity, of any separate self-hood, but of the 
living medium of the self's expression. In other 
words, that which actually mediates, which at 
the time is mediating one's expression, gives the 
only self-consciousness possible, the ultimate 
self being no mere object of consciousness at 
all, but the realizing mediated act. Two special 
theories in technical psychology, the Innerva- 
tion Theory and the Afferent Theory, have both 



1 64 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

of them, although from opposite standpoints, 
made self-consciousness a consciousness of some- 
thing other than the medium. Thus the former 
has thought of the self as consciously felt before, 
and the latter as consciously felt after, activity. 1 
Such an epiphenomenal self-consciousness, how- 
ever, is not to be thought of here. Self-con- 
sciousness is neither before nor after, but in 
activity. 

(/) The individual is not physically a mere 
medium of natural force, and spiritually the seat 
of an wholly arbitrary will, but is in himself at 
once a defined force and a responsible will ; in 
sociological terms, not a soldier, whether to 
command or to obey, but a mechanic, skilful 
by nature, the world about him being always as 
a tool already in his adapted hands, or say as 
Spinoza's hammer, never to be made, because 
original, but ever to be improved in use. And 
society is an organism of individuals, not a com- 
munity of souls, nor yet a mere mechanism of 
bodies. Relationism, in short, — that is to say, 
Dynamic Idealism, — does away with the military 
or wholly utilitarian interest of an individual in 
his fellows, or of a particular people in its neigh- 
bors, or of the civilized races in the uncivilized, 
or of man in the kingdom of animals, or even of 
1 See also pp. 210 ff. 



DYNAMIC vs. FORMAL IDEALISM. \6$ 

any living creature in its material environment; 
and this, simply because it finds the mediation 
of life always to be through no dead external 
mechanism, but always through a living media- 
tor, an organically inclusive life, which to the 
physical and biological sciences is known as 
nature, to political philosophy as the state, and 
to theology as God. 

And here this summary, although only par- 
tial, must come to an end. Yet be it hoped 
that enough has been said to show still more 
clearly than before at once the deeper tenden- 
cies of modern thought and the important 
results of these to modern life. Not-buts, more- 
over, will arise in number and in strength, 
through the chapters that follow this ; and as 
they come they will only keep us in mind of 
the simple fact that for the thinker as well as 
for the laborer the past, which is formal, is but 
the tool of the present, which is dynamic, in the 
realization of the ever-pressing future. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 

THE completed chapters of this second part 
have all of them served to define the 
view, with which we started, that consciousness 
was the essential tension of a system of actual 
relations. Thus, consciousness was said to be 
the tension of the adjustment, that is, the in- 
teraction of the relational parts of an organic 
whole ; and notably in the chapters on ideas as 
forces, on the relation of mind to body and 
soul, and on time, this view found strong cor- 
roboration. But technical psychology has had 
several terms for the dynamic phase of con- 
sciousness, and about these terms numerous 
special theories, to which some attention is 
due, have grouped themselves. The terms in 
question, or the most important of them, are 
feeling (or emotion), attention, and interest; and 
in psychological theory, as well as in every-day 
usage, these three terms have often been very 
strangely distinguished. Interest, for example, 
by some writers has been completely divorced 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. l6j 

from both feeling and attention, although such 
a divorce upon examination will be found to 
be impossible. 

In the first place, interest and feeling have 
been divorced by the exaltation of the latter 
into a faculty quite by itself. Feeling as such 
has been given a worth wholly its own. It has 
been regarded as a purely subjective state, 
which is both naturally had independently of 
any experience of an outer world and prop- 
erly cultivated for its own peculiar sake, while 
interest has been objective, mind being im- 
agined capable of interesting itself in things 
for which it has no feeling. Interest, then, 
has been a consciousness of things wholly ex- 
ternal; and feeling, an interest in an wholly 
unrelated self. 

That the courting of mere feeling in social 
life and even in education is very common 
indeed, any one who is willing to look can see 
clearly ; but equally evident is the fact that 
mere " subjective " feeling, feeling with a 
worth all its own, is, after all, not subjective, 
being objective or external even to the point 
of determinism. Schleiermacher, bent on re- 
ducing religion to mere feeling, was quite right 
in concluding that religion was a condition of 
absolute dependence ; and popular usage also 



1 68 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

has been right in applying the term not only 
to a purely subjective condition, but also to an 
altogether objective sensation. There is also 
a deal of light to be had upon the nature of 
feeling in the circumstance that, as the term 
has been used, feeling is exclusively of either 
the soul or the body. The mind, wholly de- 
void of feeling, only knows. But the soul's 
feeling and the body's feeling, in spite of the 
supposed opposition between these parts of the 
self, are at least in practice one and the same, 
whatever they may be in theory. Hegel criti- 
cised Schleiermacher by saying that he made 
beasts as religious as men ; and in human his- 
tory this criticism has certainly been justified, 
for the cultivation of emotions, moral or re- 
ligious, merely for the emotions' sake, has 
always been attended by extreme sensuality, 
the emotion proving to be only a sort of spirit- 
ual abstraction for bodily sensation. So it 
appears both from the virtual objectivity of 
merely subjective feeling and from the double 
use of the term " feeling " that the two, feeling 
and interest, are essentially one. As of other 
opposites that have come up for our attention, 
each is but an abstraction for something in the 
other. 

In practical affairs the divorce of subjective 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 169 

feeling and objective interest shows itself in the 
assumption that you can interest a man in his 
work solely by paying him for it, a Christian in 
his duty solely by the promise of happiness 
in an abstract hereafter, a scholar in his studies 
by honors or prizes or athletic contests, or, the 
money and the promises and the prizes failing, 
by their complementary methods, — tortures, 
threats, fines, disgraces. Rewards or punish- 
ments cast over an uninteresting thing the 
cloud of sentiment, so that, with plenty of 
means to reward or punish, plenty of assurance 
to promise or threaten, one has little if any 
need of interesting. With an honor-roll one 
can be a "successful" teacher; with a well- 
filled purse, a power in society ; and with mere 
avowals of allegiance to creeds and social con- 
ventions generally, a model for one's fellows. 
But, unfortunately for the assumption on which 
such successes as these are founded, the special 
charm in any case very soon ceases to work, or 
is found to work in a way not for a moment 
intended. Whoever labors for money only is 
bound in time to cheat his employer. The 
Christian who knows only the Future is really 
unfaithful to the present. The student whose 
goal you make honor or display blames you 
in time for his failure. The model for his 



170 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

fellows has a fall. Simply, then, in the Bible's 
way of putting it, " You cannot serve God and 
mammon ; " feeling and interest assert their 
identity, or dependence, even when they seem 
to have been most thoroughly divorced. 

The speculator in psychology has had two 
ways, apparently opposite, of separating interest 
from feeling. Either he has held that feeling 
comes temporally before objective interest, — 
that is, before experience or expression, — or he 
has, strangely enough, reversed the temporal 
order of the two. In regard, then, to the former 
of these positions, the meaning is, to take a con- 
crete case, that the emotion of wit precedes the 
witty saying, or again that sadness as an emotion 
comes before sadness as a condition, a man 
being sad before his trouble in any way shows 
itself, or that the feeling of doing right is ante- 
cedent to right doing, or finally, to revert to an 
illustration used above, that a workman has a 
natural right to the desired money before he 
has really earned it. Wit, however, on this 
plan always falls flat; the sadness is only a 
courted, albeit a morbidly courted, pleasure; 
the right doing never comes ; and the workman 
turns beggar. Hence, naturally, the other 
theory, which is only a reaction, and which like 
any reaction fails to escape the spell of what it 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. IJl 

opposes. Thus, to adopt another's character- 
ization of this second theory, a man, instead of 
weeping after he has found himself sad, is sad 
after finding himself weeping. If, then, the 
original theory disposes of the need of expres- 
sion, the reaction, although seeming to make 
expression necessary, gives it no meaning or 
purpose of its own. A student, for example, 
may find that what knowledge he has is of 
worth, but he will never seek knowledge; and 
the workman, after plodding aimlessly at his 
job, may sometimes discover that the work is 
lucrative, but he will never work for a return. 
And Andromache's attending maidens, who wept 
so freely at the departure of the noble Hector, 
must have found that they, too, had sorrows 
only after their tears had begun to flow. As 
Homer himself put it, " And the beautiful 
Andromache wept bitterly at the going of her 
noble lord Hector, and the maidens attend- 
ing her wept too, but each one for her own 
sorrows." 

Or can we dare to suppose that the weeping 
maidens were sad with Andromache? Can we 
even imagine that knowledge is not more in 
knowledge itself than in the getting of it? Cer- 
tainly, as between the two theories, with their 
contradictory ways of saying essentially the 



172 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

same thing, some such conclusion is not unnat- 
ural. Thus, it makes no real difference whether 
you tell a man that the return for his labor is 
originally or naturally his anyway, or that the 
labor for which he is paid is only some physical, 
wholly mechanical process, with which emotion- 
ally he has nothing to do ; and, again, it makes 
no real difference whether you say in general 
that mankind has no natural need of doing any- 
thing, pleasant or unpleasant, or that what man- 
kind* does engage in is not of its doing at all; 
and, in view of such an indifference, the con- 
clusion is that the separated things must after 
all in some way be identical and inseparable, or 
more specifically that the emotion that can be 
either before or after expression indifferently 
must in reality belong to expression. 

Just as subject and object are one, so are 
feeling and interest one. Motive and stimulus 
have sometimes been separated in the same way, 
but stimulation is obviously impossible if it does 
not answer to, or find sympathy in, subjective 
motive. Outer stimulus is necessarily also inner 
motive. Motive is not less objective than sub- 
jective. Strange is it, indeed, that men should 
ever imagine that what starts activity can be 
distinct from what afterwards controls it, or that 
feeling and interest should be two, not one. 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 173 

But, furthermore, in regard to attention the 
same psychology that has put emotion before 
condition has also put attention before its object, 
and the same psychology that has put emotion 
after condition has also put attention after its 
object. Attention, however, if before, is arbi- 
trary; and, if after, compulsory. But the ab- 
surdity here is even more striking than above. 
Forsooth, did anybody ever attend to anything 
before being conscious of it? Or did anybody 
ever withhold attention until consciousness had 
defined itself? Education, of course, has put the 
absurdity of an arbitrary or compulsory atten- 
tion in practice, just as it has practised that of 
the antecedent or subsequent emotion, but the 
results have been far from justifying the method. 
The habit in education of requiring transitions 
from one subject to another without any living 
indication of a connection between them, the 
habit, in short, of having a loosely composite, 
instead of an organic curriculum, 1 has not pro- 
duced thinkers, because it has not succeeded in 
turning attention in the necessary way ; it has, 
in general, produced only conventionalists, or, 
as they were styled before, " intellectual sui- 
cides." Both the theory and the practice of atten- 

1 Of course a prescribed curriculum must always be " loosely 
composite," for a large majority, if not for all. 



174 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

tion, however, may be left here, since it is really 
altogether evident that, just as feeling must be 
in and of expression, so attention can be only 
to what already occupies attention; and with 
more profit we shall for a moment concern 
ourselves with certain implied doctrines of 
association. 

An arbitrary or compulsory attention, an 
attention that is independent of interest, involves 
a natural separation or division in the sphere of 
objects or interests. No object, in other words, 
can be supposed to have in itself the reason for 
a transition of attention to some other. The 
association of objects, then, can take place only 
through some wholly external bond. By all 
the rights of logic, arbitrary or separate atten- 
tion, unrelated objects of attention, and external 
association belong together. Then to the doc- 
trines of attention here in question belong those 
of association by similarity and by contiguity, 
since both similarity and contiguity are external 
to the associated things. The common charac- 
ter, on which similarity depends, is wholly ab- 
stract or external to the individual objects united 
by it, and contiguity is a matter only of the 
formal space in which objects are found, not of 
the objects themselves. 

But common characters, that is to say, formal 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. 1 75 

ideas, and a formal space we have found to have 
no place in more recent theory. Ideas are dy- 
namic, things being relational ; and space is 
force. But some one declares, " A round coin 
certainly reminds me of the moon." Well, 
perhaps it does, but not solely because coin 
and moon are round. If roundness alone as a 
common quality made the association, then 
surely upon the coin being presented all the 
round things ever seen ought to flock without 
order or relation to the field of consciousness; 
but it is needless to say that they do not. Or, 
once more, some one says that, having on a cer- 
tain day seen a particular man in the post-office, 
he thinks of the man a week later, when enter- 
ing the office; and perhaps he does, but not 
from mere contiguity. What selects the man 
from other objects? Surely not similarity nor 
yet contiguity, but a mechanical relationship, 
whereby certain things have been, and so still 
are, the related incidents of the self's activity, 
is the only possible mainspring of association. 
Association, then, is by a mechanical or medi- 
ating, by an intrinsic or substantial, relationship 
in the things of experience. And apart from 
association for psychology, what but this is true 
of association in nature? Chemistry and physics 
and biology can hardly believe in association 



176 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

by formal contiguity or by abstract similarity, 
unless indeed they insist on still holding to a 
real material atomism and to a dualism between 
living organism and physical environment. 1 

So, in review, feeling is not independent of 
interest, but is one with it; attention is neither 
arbitrary nor compulsory, but natural or respon- 
sible, being always of the already present object 
of attention ; and association is not imposed, 
but original or intrinsic. Interest, therefore, at 
once subjective and objective, at once inwardly 
motivating and outwardly stimulating, is only 
the impulse to self-expression that has been 
seen to belong to the very nature of conscious- 
ness. In point of fact, it is the expression itself. 
As said before, it names the dynamic character 
of ideas or of consciousness generally. One of 
the keener thinkers of the present day has said 

1 Professor James (Psychology, vol. i. p. 549) has gone only 
half of the way to the view of association here briefly outlined. 
Thus, he has denied any such thing as the association of ideas, 
declaring that association is of things ; and in this declaration 
he is plainly only a reactionist, as also for the most part in his 
much discussed theory of emotion. True, association is not 
of ideas, because consciousness is a "stream" or only one 
running idea; but true also, things are relational, and accord- 
ingly one, not many. Only if things were many, however, 
could we properly speak of the association of things. Professor 
James, however, has since modified the views of his Psychology 
considerably. See article in the Psychological Review, 1895, 
vol. ii. no. 2, " The Knowing of Things Together." 



CONSCIOUSNESS AS INTEREST. ijj 

the following of interest : 1 " Interest (i) is active, 
projective. We take interest. Interest is de- 
mand, insistence. Whenever we have an inter- 
est in any thought we cherish it, cling to it, 
endeavor in all ways to realize or fulfil it. In- 
terest (2) implies an object, — the end or 
thought which claims attention. We are inter- 
ested in something, while mere feeling [if possible 
at all] begins and ends in itself. In common 
speech an ' interest ' means an end which 
dominates activity. Interest (3) implies the 
relation which the interesting end bears to the 
controlling lines of activity, to character. It 
expresses the identification of the object with 
the subject." Yes, interest is character; and 
with Professor Dewey's clear and concise state- 
ment this chapter may very properly conclude, 
since in interest as character, in interest as the 
" identification of the object with the subject," 
an identification which we know to be original, 
the object as a living mediator, or as language, 
is once more set before us. 

1 The Study of Ethics, by John Dewey, p. 55. Register 
Publishing Co., Ann Arbor, Mich., 1894. 



12 



CHAPTER XV. 

THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 

TF interest names the dynamic nature of con- 
•*- sciousness from the standpoint of the sub- 
ject, language is, to say the least, one of the 
terms that name the same thing from the stand- 
point of the object. Interest, as a state of 
consciousness, is always a consciousness of lan- 
guage, while as an object it is itself language; 
or language in its turn may be said to be the 
identification of the object with the subject. 
Our Relationism or Dynamic Idealism has had 
no choice but to find the object of consciousness 
naturally, essentially linguistic. But, further- 
more, for interest, which is obviously as much 
an activity as a consciousness, there is another 
term that may now be used. Interest, from the 
standpoint of ethics describable as character, is 
nothing more nor less than thought, from the 
standpoint of psychology. Thought, which is 
new to us here only in name, is the activity 
that language mediates; or, with equal ac- 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 179 

curacy, it is the activity that fulfils language 
as language. 1 

Now, of course, throughout these pages the 
term " language " has been given a very broad 
meaning. The breadth, however, has been for 
the sake of depth. Thus, the essential principle 
of language has been found in the very nature 
of objectivity. As object, or environment, or 
social institution, or tool in use, language has 
been found to be peculiar only to organic life 
as such, not to the life of human beings. En- 
vironment is perhaps the best of all the syno- 
nyms, although both science and popular usage 
have co-operated in making even this too narrow 
in its meaning. The two words, however, " lan- 
guage " and " environment," as really naming 
the same thing, will be corrective of each other. 
Besides, the more reflective biology of our time 
is ready to say that environment is essentially 
linguistic; and, as we know, the more reflective 
psychology, that the use of language is as gen- 
eral and as far-reaching as relation to environ- 
ment. But when did language begin ? With 
the beginning of organic life? Yes and no; 
since language, like anything else, so soon as 

1 The alternative definition is given here simply to keep 
before the mind the important fact that thought and language 
are one, each as taken alone being only an abstraction for 
something in the other. 



l8o DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

it is understood in its principle, is quite beyond 
the shallow question of origin. Organic life 
can know no formal, merely including time, 
and so also no beginning in time. And here, 
too, is another shallow question: Is thought 
possible without language? Without mere 
words of the ordinary sort, yes ; but certainly 
not without language, not without environ- 
ment. Merely to live is to use language, 
and life is thought. Any organic form both 
thinks and is addicted to language, whenever 
it acts. 

The view of sensation that we were led to 
take — a view which made sensation general, or 
not confined to special organs — was in itself 
enough, when we had analyzed it, to extend 
language to include the entire realm of the 
objective; but other evidences are available and 
may now be cited. Thus, to the formal gram- 
mar of earlier times we have added in our day, 
as belonging to the science of language, the 
following branches : philology, phonetics, pho- 
nology, orthography, and even others in kind; 
and these special sciences, by explaining lan- 
guage historically or geographically or physi- 
ologically or psychologically, at once bring it to 
a level with other things similarly explained, and 
so make it not a specific thing, peculiar to a cer- 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. l8l 

tain form of life and to a certain part of that form, 
but an altogether general thing. Also, if we 
accept the view that any medium of expression 
is linguistic, such changes in education as the 
mere introduction into courses of study of 
the physical and biological branches and as the 
employment of the laboratory method and the 
establishment of technical schools, and such 
changes in more directly practical affairs as 
that in religion from church and book to home 
and man, and that in civic life from no diversion 
for the people beyond verbal direction of all 
kinds to diversion through open museums and 
public parks, show that language is getting to be, 
not only in theory but also in practice, a very 
general affair. In a sense, that is certainly not 
the inalienable right of poetry, the great park 
systems of our modern cities are a means of 
bringing men and natural creatures all into 
communion with each other. Trees and fields 
and rocks and hills and lakes are a language 
that man and animal alike can heed, and heed- 
ing reply to with mutual understanding. 

But now, not to dwell longer upon the larger 
language of our own times, since as a matter of 
course anything, from the standpoint of its 
principle, must be more inclusive than the or- 
dinarily recognized expression of it, we have 



1 82 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

left to consider, more directly than heretofore, 
or at least from a side not yet approached, the 
nature and the function of language. Subject 
and object, or thought and language, we have 
found to be two contemporary incidents in the 
life of the organic, and they represent not two 
things but a relation, which is essential to the 
very integrity of an organic nature. The sub- 
ject, an organism itself, is also a relation within 
an organic whole, and the tension of this re- 
lation makes the consciousness of the object. 
But a subject's consciousness, arising in this 
way or having this general character, has the 
effect of giving to the subject, not exactly two 
activities, but two phases of one activity. Thus, 
it makes the subject at once in a state of overt 
expression and in a state of restraint, at once 
active to what is without and active to self, at 
once more or less impulsively active and more 
or less under control. So real, so positive is 
this division or differentiation in the activity of 
an organism, that one sees in it, after all, only 
the organic character itself. Not only is the 
relationship, upon which organism depends, 
inseparable from a fulfilling activity, but also 
essential to this activity is the negative factor 
of control; and if heretofore we have explained 
the object as due to dynamic relationship, 



THO UGHT AND LANG UA GE. 183 

we can now say with the same meaning that 
it is due to subjective control. The much used 
Law of Relativity is not less a law of control in 
organic life than a law of objectivity. 

In fact, an object in just so far as it is object- 
ive is the symbol of a controlled act, its unity 
or organic wholeness reflecting the relations 
implied in the act itself. Thus, to approach 
the factor of control from a slightly different 
standpoint, activity, whether as abstractly pos- 
sible or thinkable or as positively known in the 
world, is at once differentiating and organizing. 
Wholly general acts and wholly specific acts 
are impossible. Impossible also are wholly 
unconscious acts, since consciousness is the 
tension of the general and the specific. Ac- 
cordingly expression at any time, although 
never isolated, in the first place is always with 
reference to some meaning, and in the second 
place always induces a more particular mean- 
ing. Thus, paradoxically, every act both has 
a purpose or a determined relation before ex- 
pression, and upon expression finds what its 
purpose or relation is. Action, in short, al- 
though not without meaning, always induces 
interpretation of itself; it always realizes an 
existing relationship. But the interpretation 
in its turn always induces control, and con- 



1 84 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

trol brings activity to self and consciousness 
of a not-self. 1 

Of course the mere fact of activity to self in 
the life of an organism is very easily identified, 
if one is not already quite familiar with it. 
Large-written examples of it are in the difference 
between men and animals, men being human 
and having man's " natural " environment, in so 
far as they live the animal life to themselves ; and 
in the general dependence of rational observation 
on control. The day laborer who would deal 
the second blow more accurately than the first, 
pauses that the involved relations may define 
themselves, but the first had given him the 
interest in accuracy for the second. Reading, 
too, is not psychologically different from the 
laborer's reflection. The presented page, we 
usually say, in its symbols awakens a very highly 
complex imagery, in the form of reminiscences 
of all sorts and suggestions and fancies, but it all 
stands for a life that the reader has come to live 
to himself. It is his past, which as he reads re- 
turns, but in the form of an object, in which the 
unity of the present is symbolized, and through 
which a more accurate blow at life is in prepara- 
tion. The reader is measuring the relations of 

1 This relation between objectivity and subjective control I 
have also discussed at some length in the article on " The 
Stages of Knowledge," already referred to on p. 119. 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 85 

things in his world with reference to the organic 
tendencies in himself, and can be a reader only 
as he controls the tendencies. A lion, further- 
more, who growls instead of rushing at once 
into the conflict, is turned scientist for a period, 
or, suppose we say, has found the pen mightier 
than the sword ; and wherever even in animal 
life hesitation or withdrawal from immediate 
action manifests itself, there without question is 
an activity to self which involves also a clearing 
consciousness of the sphere of activity, so to 
speak, a definition of the medium. And in 
technical theory, where large facts are always 
small-written, the same activity to self is recog- 
nized. Thus, the sensation as a relation is in 
itself symbolic of some controlled action in an- 
other part of the organism. Sound to the ear 
answers to the control of the voice, and distance 
to the eye answers to a restrained movement of 
head or hand or even of the whole body. Illus- 
trations, then, are not wanting of the general 
principle that subjective control is an incident of 
the consciousness of an object, or that the move- 
ment to organization in the object, the outer 
world, is in sympathy with that in the self or 
subject, if not even identical with it. 

Activity to self, furthermore, as the phrase 
itself ought to indicate, is not a mere negation. 



1 86 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

It is more than cessation of self-expression. 
It is itself a very definite activity, or let us say 
a very real part of the functional life of an 
organism. It is so real and so definite that it 
has fulfilled itself in organs specially developed 
with it. The very division, noted above, of 
an organism's activity into an activity to what 
is without and an activity to what is within, 
is one and the same with the differentiation of 
organs of thought from organs of mere conduct, 
or, roughly speaking, of brain-functions from 
body-functions. Moreover, to venture a step 
farther in this physiological interpretation, not 
only are the organs of thought very plainly in 
a living interactive connection with those of 
conduct, and also in their separation parallel to 
the general opposition of subject and object, or 
thought and language, or social and natural 
environment, but also within their own sphere 
a corresponding or in truth a practically iden- 
tical dualism is necessary. In other words, 
their control is both of organs that are " right- 
handed," or directly governed, and of organs 
that are "left-handed," acting only mechani- 
cally although in symmetry or sympathy with 
those under the direct government. In order to 
indicate this correspondence still more defi- 
nitely, it might be said that just as environ- 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 87 

ment, or in general the outer object, may fairly 
be called an organism's left hand, so quite 
within the organism the whole system of 
negatively or indirectly controlled organs is 
objective or physically environing to the com- 
plementary system that acts right-handedly; 
and, in a single word or two, the correspond- 
ence means that right-handedness and symbolic 
expression are inseparable functions. 1 

But if activity to self be as real and as posi- 
tive as its expression in specially developed 
organs would imply, just how may it be posi- 
tively characterized ? Briefly, it is nothing but 
the subjection of foregoing activity to a sort of 
self-centred repetition or rehearsal, in order 
that before overt expression recurs the condi- 
tions and induced interpretation of the activity 
may be fully defined. Recurrence is always 
necessarily the underlying motive, but the pre- 

1 Professor Baldwin's theory of right-handedness (Mental 
Development of the Child and the Race, pp. 5S ff., Macmillan, 
1895) is certainly not opposed to the suggestion here made. 
He finds a " fundamental connection between the rise of speech 
and the rise of right-handedness " (p. 67), and we have found 
an equally fundamental connection between the language func- 
tion in general (i. e. consciousness of a mediating environment, 
self-consciousness) and the direct or " right-handed " control of 
one-half of the body. In my little book, "Citizenship and 
Salvation," I have even discovered a right-handedness in the 
relation of Socrates to the Greeks and of Christ to the Jews 
and Romans. Op. cit. pp. 27-28, and 68-70. 



1 88 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

viously induced experience enforces a sense of 
responsibility and a consequent control. Eyes 
and ears and tongue and hand, all of them 
intimately involved in the special thought- 
system and all of them marvellously mobile, 
are organs, in which originally overt acts are 
relationally or organically reproduced ; and the 
reproduction, being always in tension with overt 
expression, gives rise to a symbolic conscious- 
ness, which has the form of an after-image. 
This after-image, however, has all the essential 
marks of a name, 1 and the controlled use of it, 
the use of it with reference to its origin, is 
nothing more nor less than the expression of 
self in language; nor are we obliged here to un- 
derstand the term " language" in a sense a whit 
narrower than that before enjoined, although 
the narrower sense is here fully interpreted. 

Language, finally, as the after-image that 
rises in consciousness because of the tension 
between control or rehearsal and overt expres- 
sion, obviously has a triple function, the three 

1 1 hardly need to say that both the terms here, " name " and 
" after-image," are used with regard to underlying principles, not 
to mere ordinary applications. The after-image, for example, 
that belongs to abnormal conditions or that introspection and 
experiment discover, is one thing; the natural after-image is 
quite another. And a name is any symbolic representation 
of external relations. 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 1 89 

parts of which correspond to the three rela- 
tions that an individual, in tension with the 
life of an organic whole, inevitably assumes. 
Language is (1) objectively descriptive or 
representative, relating the self to its natural 
environment; (2) socially or organically media- 
tive, relating the self to others in kind; and (3) 
individually redemptive, relating the self to 
the unity of all. The inseparableness of these 
parts, moreover, is the all-important conclu- 
sion from this chapter; and although our pres- 
ent purposes will be satisfied without further 
statement, one cannot help drawing the moral 
that in human life scientific truth, social inter- 
course, and prayer to God should be a single 
interest, and not the three separate interests 
that they seem to have been so long. Indeed, 
for such time as they are separate not one of 
them is what it claims to be. An individual's 
science, for example, science without inter- 
course, is formal, and only intercourse can 
make it dynamic. Prayer, too, without science, 
is also without faith. The true prayer is the 
scientific intercourse of many, the science giv- 
ing it faith and the intercourse giving it life 
or motive. 

But after language, action. Simply by reason 
of the organic connection between the organs 



190 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

of activity to self and the organs of overt 
activity, thought sooner or later dies in a ful- 
filling conduct; naming is succeeded by doing; 
the self, only for a time identified with its iso- 
lating thought-organs, abandons the rehearsing 
and the after-imagery, returning to its world, 
— entering the World of Acts, passing from 
appearance to reality. 1 

In social evolution, where the conscious organism 
is a whole people, the same process of thought that 
has just been outlined here from the standpoint of a 
single individual, can be easily detected. Thus, with 
the rise and growing supremacy of a metropolis, a 
people is seen to be thinking and " naming " its 
former life, to be living the former life to itself. The 
city, so wonderfully mobile, exhibits miles of farm- 
land and years of experience focused even in a 
single block. It is the very much contracted life and 
in its institutions the very much contracted symbol 
of the country. The old relations persist, but greatly 
intensified. The great department-store, for example, 
is the country-store over again, but on a much grander 
scale ; and the streets have the same function as the 
country roads, but driver and wayfarer cannot be too 
alert. Also, no new institutions are created, but the 
old ones of the village are established on larger plans. 

1 Or, in Kant's terms, from "phenomena" to the " thing-in- 
itself." Kant's phenomenal world, however, was a language 
or medium, to which he denied any actual mediation, — a 
dead language. 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 191 

Yes, the city repeats or rehearses the country life, 
and intensifies it, turning simplicity into complexity, 
naivete" into self-consciousness and sophistication. But, 
more than this, the rise of cities with their congested 
population always shows the country life suffering de- 
cline, the people living it henceforth to themselves. 
Do but consider, in evidence, how the rural civiliza- 
tion decays. The country people lose their culture 
and change to mere drudges, little better than day 
laborers. Inactivity sets in among them. Even 
their agriculture often passes into the hands of large 
owners, and becomes, so far as the country is con- 
cerned, a purely mechanical, left-handed process, be- 
ing indeed very commonly transferred to unsettled 
territory. The great department-store not only repro- 
duces the country-store, but takes away its business by 
carrying on an ever-increasing "out-of-town" trade. 
And the city goes to the theatre and the ball, while 
the deserted old people on the farms pine for the 
days when life was so much more worth while, 
resenting perhaps the means of communication and 
transportation that have made the changed conditions 
possible. In short, then, the country dies as the city 
lives ; and it dies, just because, as was said, in the 
city a people comes to live its old life to itself, or to 
" name " the old life, the positive activity having been 
put in abeyance. Thus, again, with an absorbing 
interest rather in control, distribution, communication, 
and manufacture than in direct production, the city 
manifests just such a withdrawal from nature, — that is, 
from the sphere of original expression, — as is implied 



192 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

in thinking generally; to repeat, it shows a whole 
people thinking a former life. 

Furthermore, contemporaneous with the rise of 
the city is the division of the people into classes. 
Names for these classes are not easily found, but 
the following will serve to mark the essential differ- 
ences : (i) Thinkers arise, who control; (2) officials, 
who do the clerical work, so to speak, of getting the 
after-image on paper ; and (3) laborers, who partly 
in the country and partly in the city do the physical 
drudgery. Plato found these classes, though he gave 
them slightly different names, in the city of Athens, 
when Greek thinking was at its height. But either 
Plato's names or ours suggest a sort of analogy to 
the (1) right-handed and (2) left-handed organs of 
thought and (3) the merely physical organs of conduct. 
To the analogy itself, in the terms given, there probably 
attaches no great importance, but it certainly indicates 
some fundamental relations in social life. 

" But, after language, action. . . . Thought sooner 
or later dies in a fulfilling conduct ; naming is suc- 
ceeded by doing." The evolution of the classes in 
society shows this. These classes, though retaining 
their original relations, change both in their form and 
in their personnel after some such plan as follows, 
the several stages or moments being (1.) the stage of 
consciously asserted patriotism, (2) the stage of 
aesthetic self- appreciation, (3) the stage of the cos- 
mopolitan spirit, (4) the stage of assumed and cul- 
tivated naturalism, and (5) the stage of spiritual 
surrender or resignation. Thus : — 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 



193 



Five Stages in Social Evolution. 



O v> 
Z. v 

"2 2 

qOT 


Thinkers 


Officials 


Laborers 


Historical Illus- 
tration 


1 


Law-makers 


Soldiers 


Slaves 


Greece before Peri- 
cles' time 


2 


Artists 


Citizens 


Paid Servants 


The Age of Peri- 
cles 


3 


Scientists 


Politicians 


Artisans 


The Period just be- 
fore Socrates 


4 


Philosophers 


Fatalists or 
Time-servers 


Revolutionists 


The Socratic Period 


5 


Religious 
Leader 


Followers 


Hirelings 


Greece, a Christian- 
Roman Province 



Thought in general controls activity in order to unify 
it. The legislative thinker, however, controls rather 
through restraint than understanding, and is therefore 
the first to appear in the moments of a society's 
self-consciousness, and has soldiers and slaves as his 
natural contemporaries. After him comes the artist, 
— that is, the historian or particularly the dramatist, — 
who defines life positively or explicitly, but still in sen- 
suous terms. The legislator only forbids expression of 
impulses, while the artist controls it by revealing a har- 
mony in the sphere of the expression. So with artists 
go citizens instead of mere soldiers, and servants instead 
of slaves, the larger freedom being shared by all in the 
body politic. Then after art comes science, thought 
penetrating to a still deeper view. Science is art at 
its limit, just as art might be styled legislation at its 
limit. For science art's sensuously expressed ideal 
becomes only an idea or a natural mechanical law, 
13 



194 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

the unity or harmony of art being freed from any sen- 
suous relation to restrained impulses or stimulating ob- 
jects. Contemporary with scientists, therefore, are the 
politicians, for whom social life is a carefully measured 
opportunity instead of a devotion, cosmopolitanism 
having succeeded patriotism, and artisans, who also 
serve rather a trade than a master. But close upon 
science in the evolution of a thinking society follows 
philosophy, and thereupon society is seen to assert 
once for all an independence of traditions, institu- 
tions, and long- cherished ideals. Moreover, the in- 
dependence that her philosophers teach, her fatalists 
or time-servers, as if the clerks of philosophy, un- 
wittingly practise, and her enemies at home and 
abroad give promise of fulfilling. And the fulfilment 
comes with religion and some form of imperialism, 
the spiritual and the material finding themselves 
once more, after a long separation, identified in a 
revolution, in a forward movement of history. 

So, as was said, in social as well as in individual 
life, conduct follows thought. The spiritual con- 
sciousness of faith succeeds the self-consciousness of 
reason. 



p>att in. 

THE WORLD OF ACTS. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

REACTION OR INTERACTION? 

AT the close of the Introduction the three 
questions that follow were set for an- 
swer : What are things? What are ideas? 
And what are acts? These questions, as we 
very soon came to see, amounted to inquiries 
into the nature of body and mind and soul 
respectively ; and to the first two of them an- 
swers have been given already, while at least by 
implication much has been said also in reply to 
the third, notably in the chapter entitled " Body, 
Mind, Soul." Certainly it has been made clear 
that the objectivity of things, of ideas, and of 
acts is not of three distinct sorts, — the physical, 
the rational, and the spiritual, — but only of one 
sort, which we may now call the organic. Of 
the world of acts, however, more remains to be 
said. Certain implications need to be made 
explicit. Thus, in the first place, is the individ- 
ual self's activity a reaction or an interaction ? 

This question gets its interest from the fact 
that not only ethics but also psychology and 



198 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

even physiological psychology have held, or at 
least expressed themselves as if they held, that 
the typical act was a reaction, and this in the 
face of very serious difficulties. 1 As commonly 
represented, reaction is a dualistic conception, 
being in general the peculiar response to an 
external stimulus, or, in other words, the mani- 
festation of a causal power, — that is, a power of 
initiating action, — attributed to some isolated 
organ or organic individual. Now in one way, 
now in another, the advocates of reaction de- 
clare that a certain single representative of the 
world's phenomena does wholly of itself cause 
the differences, if not even the existence, of 
some other representative; that representative 
a, for example, causes representative b or at 
least whatever in b distinguishes it from a. 
This view, however, of action or causation, 
arising, as it plainly does, from the notion that 
individuality is a matter of physical determina- 
tions, is altogether absurd, and is seen to be so 
as soon as it is clearly and directly stated. 

In social life the habit of cherishing the 
human body after death is an indication of the 
view of individual activity here in question; 
but, as hinted before, both physiology and 
psychology also show the same determination 
1 Cf. pp. 160-161. 



REACTION OR INTERACTION? 199 

to treat a single physical part as having quite 
within its physical self the power of initiation, 
or — and this in the end amounts to the same 
thing — they regard that upon which the in- 
dividual acts as only the external occasion, the 
merest stimulus of the activity. This, however, 
is sheer creationism, and one wonders, upon rec- 
ognizing its marks, how it can have held its own 
so long in scientific circles. Even the physical 
scientist, in the very face of his hypothesis of 
conservation, has failed again and again to see 
that causal relationship among nature's phe- 
nomena cannot possibly be an affair of the arbi- 
trary creative reaction of one part upon another, 
but must be something altogether different from 
this; being, let us say at once, much more 
accurately described as an interaction of the 
parts, or, to use the very terms employed before 
in the account of mind, a relating activity, in 
which nature ever realizes or substantiates 
herself. Cause and effect, too, like end and 
means, must be contemporaries ; they cannot 
belong to separate intervals of time, as the 
dualist would have them. 

But somebody says at this point, as if still 
unconvinced, that action, or at least the action 
of a living self, must be free, having not only a 
power of initiation but also a power of material 



200 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

creation. Well, so it must, if by life you mean 
something external to the agent, something 
introduced from without. To any one, any 
agent, living a life not his own, initiation and 
creation are necessary. Such an agent, how- 
ever, is not substantially free. The freedom 
given to him in his power of material creation 
is wholly taken away in his dependence upon 
an external life or an external stimulus. His 
power of initiation is only a conceit. Give 
him creative power, then, if you must, but rec- 
ognize that so far as he is concerned what 
he does or makes is wholly idle, being useless 
to him in the next minute. Such creation is 
what in popular language has sometimes been 
known as " puttering ; " and I venture to say 
that even the subjects of study in many lab- 
oratories of the present day are so far diverted 
from their natural life by formalistic scientists 
as to be made mere " putterers." Puttering is 
not confined to the every-day life of society, for 
let us remember that subjects in laboratories 
are very much like actors on a stage, exhibiting 
to the public its own foibles. 

Fortunately the freedom of formal initiation 
and material creation is not the only freedom. 
Life can also be free to create itself, to be crea- 
tive within itself; and with such a freedom it 



REACTION OR INTERACTION? 201 

quite escapes from the need of peculiar responses 
to external stimuli. Thus, in the first place, 
since life is in reality universal, since there is no 
lifeless sphere, no realm of the essentially inor- 
ganic, sudden coming into being is unnecessary. 
All parts already share in the vital force ; no 
part possesses anything peculiar ; so that effects 
external to or different from their causes, as 
well as agents aloof from their stimuli, are quite 
out of place, differences being quite as much an 
antecedent condition as a subsequent result of 
activity. Organic differentiation is creative, but 
quite in and of itself, quite within itself. Actual 
relationship, in which lies the world's substan- 
tiality, as well as that of any individual in the 
world, requires change, but a change only intrin- 
sic to itself. And, in the second place, freedom 
under any other principle than that of an iden- 
tity of inner motive and outer stimulus is, after 
all is said, as empirically unreal as it is theoreti- 
cally impossible. Even the dualist shows this, 
when he makes the agent arbitrary and the outer 
stimulus external, since external stimulus and 
arbitrary initiation are one and the same thing. 

That stimulus and motive are one, we have 
seen in many places already. Perhaps the uni- 
versality of language is the most direct and 
suggestive indication of the identity; but in the 



202 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

fact of environment being natural, not alien, or 
of adjustment being original, not acquired, or of 
ideas and forces being one and the same, not two 
and distinct, or of objectivity being incident to 
the negative factor of control, that is involved in 
all organic life, motive and stimulus, the inner 
and the outer, are seen to be inseparable. And, 
as for current psychology, the doctrine of sensa- 
tion as not an element of knowledge, as not 
a peculiar consciousness of a physical disturb- 
ance, but a relation, is its most direct index to 
the same inseparableness. Indeed, from the 
standpoint of psychology, I have myself liked to 
call the identity of stimulus and motive the first 
law of knowledge, although, or possibly just 
because, it is a law rather of action than of 
knowledge. The sensation as a relation, how- 
ever, objectivity as an incident of organic con- 
trol, and motive and stimulus as identical are all 
three but different views of the same truth ; they 
all show that action, instead of ever being dual- 
istically reactive, must always be, as among 
different parts or between any agent and his 
environment, organically interactive. How can 
action be anything else but this, when environ- 
ment in its separation only represents an other- 
ness that is intrinsic to the unity of the self? 
Agent and environment, then, are always each 



REACTION OR INTERACTION? 203 

other's natural contemporaries, just as thought 
and language are contemporary, living the same 
life, each in its character being evolved with the 
other, not one from or out of the other. Both 
evolution and creationism have been disposed 
to make one of the two outgrow the other, and 
so have erred seriously. According to evolu- 
tion, mind has not only grown out of, but it has 
also outgrown matter, and, according to crea- 
tionism, matter, although originally produced by 
mind, has had henceforth no natural dealings 
with its cause. But, like the left hand, with 
which we have already compared it, environ- 
ment really keeps in adjustment to its right- 
handed agent. 

In the view of action, furthermore, to which 
we have been led, there are involved important 
conclusions about such bones of contention in 
the scientific world as impulse, instinct, and 
habit. Briefly, then, what can we say of these? 

Parallel to the opposition that has been out- 
lined between arbitrary reaction and organic in- 
teraction, is that between impulse, instinct, and 
habit as marking three distinct sorts or classes of 
activity, and as marking only three inseparable in- 
cidents of all activity. An agent, whose environ- 
ment is alien and who is therefore condemned 
to arbitrary reactions upon external stimulations 



204 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

will apparently have three distinct sorts of acts 
to offer in any of life's emergencies : first, acts 
that are with reference to the environment but 
not in adjustment to it, — blindly impulsive acts, 
in other words ; second, acts that are neither 
with reference to environment nor in adjustment 
to it, or so-called instinctive acts; and, third, 
acts that are both with reference to environment 
and in adjustment to it, or habits. Thus, as 
the terms are very commonly used in human 
relations, a man's impulses are only his blind 
feelings for adjustment, acts that may or may 
not be successful; his habits are actual adjust- 
ments ; and his instincts not adjustments at all. 
All three, however, are forms of arbitrary reac- 
tion, since the impulses are blind, the instincts 
are useless, and the habits can be secured only 
by chance and continued only by literal repeti- 
tion, so that the agent really gains nothing from 
the choice that we have conceded him. This, 
however, suggests that the three sorts of activity 
must, after all, be one, and that the dualism 
which, through its notion of an alien environ- 
ment, manages at least in a fictitious way to 
separate them, is itself a fiction. 

But how can impulse, instinct, and habit be 
one and still retain the distinct meanings that 
men insist on giving them? Well, it is easy to 



REACTION OR INTERACTION? 205 

see that impulsiveness at least must be charac- 
teristic of all activity, since acts in so far as par- 
ticular — that is, as distinguished in any way — 
must have some already defined relations, and 
so cannot be in themselves purely impulsive. 
So I say that impulsiveness belongs rather to 
activity as such than to any special group of 
acts. To declare, for example, that somebody 
has many impulses, to classify impulses, is to 
lose sight of what impulse is. Impulse, like 
stimulus, must be one, not many. The outer 
world is not properly looked upon as a group 
of stimuli, since the real stimulus is always the 
relational unity of all the parts ; nor should the 
subject within be thought to be a bundle of im- 
pulses or to have in itself a conflict of impulses 
with habits or with any other supposedly 
" higher " activities, since all movement towards 
activity springs only from the dynamic charac- 
ter of organic unity. And, again, impulse can 
be neither something to be avoided nor some- 
thing to be expressed in action, since action 
itself is impossible without it; and, as for im- 
pulse being blind, it undoubtedly is so, if the 
blindness is with reference to something wholly 
external to the activity. A consciousness, how- 
ever, of the inner conditions of the activity, a 
consciousness incident to the interactions of the 



206 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

organic members of the agent, accompanies all 
impulsive action. 

And habit, as an act of adjustment, is, so to 
speak, environment urging its fulfilment in the 
self. It is the impulsiveness of action from the 
standpoint of environment. We talk of bad 
habits and of good habits, but so doing we use 
the term loosely, since habit, like stimulus and 
like impulse, is fundamentally one. Only the 
thing that a man is always doing can be called a 
true habit, and a man is always doing only one 
thing. The so-called habit, the habit of par- 
ticular relations, has the company of other 
activities and so is not habitual. Its form as 
well as its meaning is constantly changing. 
There is no such thing as being condemned to 
a particular line of conduct. " Habits " can be 
changed, because they do change of themselves, 
because they are not habitual, because they 
are particular. 

Finally, if impulse and habit are the same 
thing from two sides, what of instinct? Instinct 
applies to the selfs activity in so far as it 
realizes a social relation to lower forms of life 
or an adjustment to what has been called here 
the " natural " environment. The activity of 
individual organs is instinctive; of the whole 
organism, impulsive or habitual ; and of course 



REACTION OR INTERACTION? 20"J 

the two are not to be separated, being one 
activity after all. Animals, we are wont to say, 
are instinctive, not rational ; but animals are 
social only to a part of our life or only to our 
life in individual organs. Instinct, then, is 
related to habit, the activity of the organ to that 
of the organism, very much as means to end ; 
and, in view of this relation, we can say con- 
clusively that all activity is impulsive and 
habitual and instinctive. One cannot escape 
one's instincts, nor can one on the other hand 
safely lose the self in them ; but still all activ- 
ity is instinctive. Indeed all three, — impulse, 
instinct, and habit, — being fundamental in all 
activity, are alike in this respect, that they are to 
be neither avoided nor cultivated for their own 
sakes. They are all to be trusted, but not 
courted; and controlled, but not abandoned. 

Now action, as at once impulsive, instinctive, 
and habitual, as always inducing change even 
in the interest of preserving unity, is the source 
of the individual agent's substantiality, while at 
the same time it relates him to the whole of 
which he is an organic part. Actuality of 
relationship, in other words, not physical parti- 
tion or determination, is the true criterion of real 
individuality. The agent, who acts in the way 
here advocated, is not less an individual because 



208 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

not exercising a peculiar arbitrary creative 
power, but is all the more truly an individual 
for being so immediately responsible to what is 
— and to himself as a vital incident of what is. 
Here, however, we are brought to the fact of 
will, to be considered in another chapter. Of 
course, apart from a substantial individuality in 
the agent, will would be even less than the 
breath used in speaking the word. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

WILL. 

WILL is the demand, essential in organic 
life, for preservation of the integrity of 
organic differences. Every organ, then, be- 
cause different, because individual, having a 
particular relation to maintain, a peculiar 
function to express, has a will, and with its 
will a substantial freedom. True, no indi- 
vidual has an alien environment to deal with; 
but. it has the otherness, the objectivity, which 
is fundamental to its own nature, and this 
otherness makes its will actual and its freedom 
real. With reference to an alien environment 
will and freedom could be only formal, — con- 
ceits, not facts. 

Will, then, to bring into use here a conclu- 
sion that was defined quite clearly in the pre- 
ceding chapter, is not arbitrarily creative but 
responsibly mediative. It is not something 
imposed upon activity from without, but is 
itself a part of activity. It is the positive of 
that of which we have found control, also an 
14 



2IO DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

inner incident of action, to be the negative. It 
is related to control as the subject is related to 
the object or the self to the not-self. And 
here, at least so far as principles go, we might 
stop. To say more is hardly necessary. Still, « 
now as before, criticism of special theories 
and illustration from practical affairs may not 
be altogether idle. Thinkers, as well as chil- 
dren, should be allowed to play with their 
developed powers. 

The doctrine of will is intimately connected 
with that of the feeling of effort ; and naturally 
enough, since effort is an evidence of will. Of 
the feeling of effort, however, there are even 
to-day two contending theories among psychol- 
ogists, both of them involving a separation of 
will and action, — the Innervation Theory and 
the Afferent Theory, referred to in a former 
chapter. 1 These theories are parallel to those 
of emotion and attention that were examined in 
the chapter on " Interest. " Thus, the former 
of the two says that the feeling of effort is of 
the output of energy necessary to perform a 
certain act, or let us say, in interpretation, the 
agony of the soul in its struggle with an un- 
willing body. This undoubtedly approaches 
to the view to which most men to-day unreflec- 
i P. 164. 



WILL. 2 1 1 

tively incline. The Afferent Theory, however, 
would have the feeling of effort rather a conse- 
quent of action than an antecedent of it ; and to 
this view many psychologists of recent times, 
among them even James, have been very 
strongly disposed. If the Innervation Theory 
would have us feel our souls as something 
entering the organs of action from without, the 
Afferent Theory, not less violent in its separa- 
tion of the willing agent from the sphere of his 
activity, would have us feel the effort of an 
act, — that is, feel responsible for an act, — in 
which we really have had no part, making the 
feeling only attendant upon action, not vitally 
incident to it. In one case, then, we are not 
naturally interested in what we do; in the 
other, we did not do it. 

Such, then, are the theories that we have to 
face with all boldness. No doubt a certain 
plausibility belongs to each of them. In social 
life and on laboratory tables we do often come 
across characters that seem the incarnation of 
one or the other of them. Some people, for 
example, feel so much effort before they have 
done anything, — so much, in fact, that they 
stop at the feeling; and others feel so keenly the 
effort of what they have done, whether just now 
or long ago, or even of what others are doing, — 



212 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

they feel this so keenly that they, too, turn 
inactive. But, after all, living on the mere 
zeal of future activity or on the mere fatigue of 
past activity or of others' activity is not real 
effort. Effort is neither antecedent zeal nor 
subsequent fatigue; it is in and of activity 
itself. 

Activity, like everything else which we have 
had occasion to consider, is not manifold and 
serial, but single and continuous. Nobody 
ever does or ever did more than one thing. 
Upon one deed, and one deed only, each one of 
us is forever harping. Hence the worth and 
the hope and the responsibility of life. But, if 
action is one, not many, the feeling of effort 
can be apart from it in the sense of neither the 
Innervation nor the Afferent Theory. Only 
the already or only the still active self can have 
it. Suppose a man at work in his shop, using 
now one tool, now another. His work is neces- 
sarily single; and this too, although perhaps 
not so obviously to a casual observer, even if he 
be a poor workman, say a mere apprentice, who 
only "putters." Certainly he is not engaged 
in a series of wholly unrelated acts. His feel- 
ing of effort, then, belongs to his action. He 
has it because he is doing something, not 
because he is going to do, nor because he has 



WILL. 213 

already done something. Only if the work 
were serial and composite could the sense of 
effort be said to come before or after the use of 
any particular tool. The feeling before action 
does very well for an immaterial spirit, an 
unworldly soul; and after action, for a physi- 
cal automaton; but for a self responsibly at 
work upon something in the world it cannot 
but be in and of the activity itself. 

So the appeal to the feeling of effort is no 
argument for a separate or arbitrary will. On 
the contrary, it leads to a justification of an 
intrinsic or responsible will. Another appeal, 
however, is often made. The moral life is 
said to need a separate arbitrary will; but, 
in reality, does it? 

Listen to the erring youth. " I will do 
better," he says, "I won't offend again; I 
won't, I won't, I won't ! " And, as we know, 
the more he says he will not the more he is in 
clanger of falling. But, on the supposition of 
an arbitrary will, the resolution once made 
would be conclusive, not perhaps so far as ex- 
ternal action is concerned, but at least so far as 
moral character is concerned. After his de- 
termined "I won't," the youth may err, but 
quite in spite of himself. He would err, of 
course, simply for the reason that " I will " and 



214 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

" I won't " have the effect of holding in mind 
the very thing not to be done, and, interest 
being a source at least of action, if not of will, 
his resolution falls before the retained idea. A 
cashier, for example, who persistently says that 
he will not take the bank's money, is already in 
one of the stages of embezzlement. And yet, 
to repeat, on the theory of will as arbitrary, his 
persistent " I won't " ought to relieve him from 
further responsibility. His spirit is so willing ; 
only his flesh is weak ; so that, not upon him, 
but upon circumstances, lies the blame. In the 
moral life, in fine, one must always take the 
will for the deed; and, if taking, of course 
also offer it. 

Taking or offering the will for the deed is 
exactly what the theory of a creative or initia- 
tive will leads to ; and, accordingly, under this 
theory any creature at any time should be able 
to do anything, or at least should have and 
claim credit for such a universal ability. Any- 
body could preach, be president, practise medi- 
cine, study metaphysics, or even work on a 
railroad. The shivering poor, in midwinter, 
would be able to bask in summer's sunshine, 
and accordingly by the rich should be treated 
as always warm; and the city child, dreaming 
of the fragrant woods and hillsides, could go 



WILL. 215 

forth at once and gather the nodding flowers. 
Bad characters, too, merely by taking thought 
could add cubits to their moral stature; and 
good characters could perform bad deeds with 
impunity. But are such possibilities as these 
the needs, the necessary conditions, of a moral 
life? Is society at the present time in any sub- 
stantial and positive way moral, because these 
possibilities are given the semblance of reality? 
Is taking the mere will for the deed effecting 
anything like a moral regeneration? The ques- 
tions carry their own answers ; and here for the 
sake of a moral order and of a substantial moral 
responsibility, as above for the sake of a con- 
sistent tenable theory, we have to conclude 
that will is action and action will. To separate 
will from action is to teach determinism and 
irresponsibility. 

Here is a racer toeing the mark in readiness 
for a race. At the appointed signal he dashes 
across the line and out upon the course; but 
who that knows how strained his muscles are, 
even while he waits, and how his chest rises and 
falls, and how his blood presses in his veins, can 
fail to believe that he is already in the race be- 
fore he "wills" to run? At the signal, then, 
he only wills to do what he already is doing, 
while before the signal he is only running the 



2l6 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

race to himself, or thinking or "naming" it; 
and, in general, will is never of anything but 
what the agent is already doing. Will mediates 
existing activity, it does not create activity. A 
young man stands at what the commencement 
orators call the brink of life, and must choose 
what he will do, what he will be ; but neither 
can he nor will he choose to be what he is not, 
or to do what he is not already doing. His own 
real choice will lie in a volition to do what he is 
doing and has been doing. It might, then, be 
well for society to recognize this in planning for 
his education ; and it is certainly idle for others 
to choose for him. Of course, had he an arbi- 
trary will, he could assume successfully what- 
ever way of life might be thought wise for him ; 
but in the absence of such a will, another's 
choosing for him only gives him a uniform that 
never fits. Creatures in misfit uniforms, how- 
ever, are beggars. Any man whose life differs 
from his choice, or whose avowal differs from 
his will, is a beggar; and in human relations, 
the effect of supposing will a separate creative 
power is to induce, not freedom and responsi- 
bility, but beggary, — intellectual and moral and 
religious beggary. 

Because will is mediative, not materially 
creative, wholly external consequences of ac- 



WILL. 217 

tion are quite impossible. After action the 
agent can never claim a lofty irresponsibility, 
exclaiming with reference to certain unfortunate 
results, " I did not mean to." Whatever is 
done is meant, and whatever one does shows 
just what one is. The underlying principle is 
that the very fact of action proves its results 
were intended, since merely to be able to act 
in a given set of conditions is to know before- 
hand how the conditions themselves may act. 
In a life that is essentially organic, that in- 
volves the original adjustment of an agent to 
his environment, action is most assuredly more 
than a mere blind gambling. Indeed, even 
at Monte Carlo, there is no such thing as blind 
gambling. The player wills to accept what- 
ever lot the wheel may turn. Similarly, to 
take a timely illustration from the more normal 
life, the cyclist, speeding around the corner 
and knowing exactly what may happen, wills 
the turning of his fateful wheel and cannot say 
in the event of a collision that he meant no 
one any harm. Any agent means whatever 
he knows may happen, and he knows what 
may happen if he be really an agent. Monte 
Carlo, then, is more than a mere locality where 
a peculiar life is cultivated ; it is born of gen- 
erally existing social conditions, being only an 



2l8 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

abstraction for something very wide-spread. 
Certain reformers may loudly and holily con- 
demn the place, but not with any very telling 
effect, if they too assume that life's incidents 
are external to life itself, that the future is not 
in the present, or that will belongs to a separate 
soul. Of their dualism the life at Monte Carlo 
is but a startling parody, although, as said be- 
fore, even there a complete separation of will 
and action has not been found possible. What 
the gambling spirit of our time needs is not 
the preaching of unworldly idealists, but the 
removal of the many barriers to its suffering 
more speedily the consequences of its actions. 
Church and bank and state have helped in 
countless ways to foster it, and many are the 
conventions in family life and in education and 
in " society " that strengthen its conviction of 
irresponsibility. Strangely enough, at Monte 
Carlo the life avenges itself promptly, while in 
normal life the mediation is slow; so that 
society would seem to be sacrificing some of 
its members to the continuation of its own 
sinfulness. This, however, only means that 
society also has a mediating will, since its 
sacrifices are bound in time to induce control. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE LIVING IDEAL. 

*T^HE " World of Acts " is pre-eminently the 
-*• world of morals and religion, and were 
we to select from all that has gone before the 
special conclusions that have the most direct 
bearing upon the moral and spiritual life, the 
originality of the self's adjustment to its environ- 
ment and the responsible mediation of will 
would be, I think, the ones taken. True, these 
two are in reality but a single conclusion, and 
the many others can be drawn from them 
very quickly; but these especially affect one's 
doctrine of personal conduct, because they 
face so directly the standpoints of Determin- 
ism and Indeterminism, of Materialism and 
Supernaturalism. 

Making adjustment original or, as the same 
thing, finding in environment a living mediator, 
is fatal to Determinism and Materialism, and 
making will substantially responsible is equally 
fatal to Indeterminism and Supernaturalism. 



220 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

In a word, the simple evidence of our conclu- 
sions is that the self's activity is controlled from 
without neither in the way of an external and 
physically determining environment nor in the 
way of a separate and arbitrary soul. The self's 
activity controls itself. Whatever determination 
there is, is intrinsic. 

Also in the originality of adjustment, or the 
living mediation of environment, and in the sub- 
stantial responsibility of will, we see that the 
ideal of the self's activity is real and living, even 
while it is ideal. Moreover, the importance of 
this fact to the personal life can hardly be over- 
estimated. Not to secure or create new activity, 
but to fulfil the activity that already is ; not to 
become a new creature, but to prove the old 
creature ; not to save to the worldly self a sep- 
arate unworldly soul, but to express the saved 
self that already is, — this is what each living 
being has ever to do, this is the only urgency 
that the ideal imposes. The ideal is itself the 
activity, or the saved self, that already is. The 
Christian knows what it is to have the ideal real 
and living; and our thinking in these pages, as 
if in justification of Christianity, has only applied 
the Christian's belief to all the reaches of human 
interest, nay, to all the reaches of life in its en- 
tirety. As man is larger than men, so Christian- 



THE LIVING IDEAL. 221 

ity is larger than man. Environment is a living 
mediator, a word incarnate. 

Of course the living ideal is personal, and 
in its own right. An external ideal, fixed and 
lifeless, belonging to the long-ago past or the 
far-away future, would be impersonal, tyran- 
nical, impossible, and so would depend on per- 
sonification. But a living ideal, to repeat, is 
personal, and, being personal in its own right, 
changes. It changes relatively to the life that it 
controls. Personality is always a relationship, 
not a lifeless unrelated thing ; and relationship 
requires change. If the criterion of the truth of 
an idea is its value as a plan that liberates will, or 
makes possible the application of force, then in 
like manner the criterion of the personal reality 
of an ideal is its value as a way of life that medi- 
ates action. Religion then is not now, and it 
never has been, the more or less arbitrary per- 
sonification of nature. It is and it always has 
been a personal relationship to nature. 

And what this all leads to, psychologically, 
is simply that a sense of personal relationship 
is intrinsic to the consciousness of an environ- 
ment. Thus, environment as other-than-the-self 
or as objective, the otherness or the objec- 
tivity being but a vital incident of the individ- 
ual self's own organic life, must itself be of 



222 DYNAMIC IDEALISM. 

personal value and meaning to the individual, and 
must be also the sphere of other organic lives in 
themselves personally significant and valuable 
too. When, in an earlier chapter, we found 
that environment, or language, had a triple 
function, being at once objectively descriptive, 
socially mediative, and individually redemptive, 
we really had this same personality, which is 
fundamental in environment, before us ; but 
here the fact is possibly even clearer than it 
was then. The single doctrine, of more re- 
cent pages, that will is mediative, not arbitrary, 
is conclusive evidence that personality in the 
outer world is not the creation of imagination 
or after-thought. Personality, whether in one's 
fellows or in one's whole environment, cannot 
be thought to be due to any such subtle pro- 
cess as projection of self, or ejection, or even 
injection, 1 or finally to anything else equally 
violent. As said before, man does not now, 
and in the past never has personified his en- 
vironment, but he is and always has been per- 
sonally related to it, and he does not, as if at 
a time of special interest and good-will, person- 
ify his fellows, but has to them also an original 
personal relation. 

1 The inject, I believe, is yet to come to the mystification 
of philosophy. 



THE LIVING IDEAL. 223 

The World of Acts, then, is a world of 
persons. Personality, which is only the act- 
uality of relationship under a new name, is its 
substance. And if to anybody this means 
that God is alive on earth, the Living Ideal, 
then the study now concluded will simply have 
turned from psychology to theology. 



APPENDIX. 

A STUDY OF IMMORTALITY IN 
OUTLINE. 



'5 



APPENDIX. 

A STUDY OF IMMORTALITY IN OUTLINE. 1 
I. 

AT the present time there are indications, which 
any who look can see, that human thought and 
human life are entering upon a new era, or permit me 
to say upon a new dynasty. It may, of course, be 
that at any time evidences of an important transition 
can be found ; but should that be the case, one's 
responsibility to the changes of one's own time is 
made only truer and greater. 

The present dynasty began, as historians have very 
generally agreed, with certain early Greeks, and rose 
to its greatest glory and power in the days of imperial 
Rome, at once political and religious, temporal and 
spiritual, in her authority ; and from Romanism, not 
specifically as a visible institution, but as an all-per- 
vading social condition, the present time is not by 
any means free, although a process of liberation is 
going on. When the liberation is fulfilled, then the 
new dynasty will appear, and upon appearance will 

1 This "Study "was written independently of the present 
book, but it is appended here as a serviceable supplement to 
chapter xi. on "Body, Mind, Soul." 



228 APPENDIX. 

of course be found to have begun even in what is 
now the prehistoric past. 

Contemporaneity sets the temporal as well as the 
spatial or territorial bounds of a dynasty. Thus, 
Greek thought and life and our present thought and 
life are fundamentally contemporaneous, and with 
them or with their sovereignty we connect certain 
more or less closely related parts of the earth's surface. 
The Greeks and ourselves have been under the control 
of the same idea of the self, as body or as mind or as 
soul. And as for a change of dynasty, this means, 
as has been hinted in part already, not only (i) the 
rise of a new visible sovereign, but also (2) a virtual 
extension into earlier times of the recognized "line 
of succession," a new dynasty always overlapping at 
both ends the supplanted one, and (3) a widening of 
the directly controlled domain. In general, change 
always deepens, and deepening brings fulfilment, not 
overthrow, and fulfilment, by revealing the " prehis- 
toric " past, makes it henceforth a vital part of the 
controlling present, and by displacing the existing life 
from its more or less limited part of the earth's terri- 
tory relates it positively to other parts that were for- 
mally closed to it. The historic past and the historic 
future — for of course there is always the latter in 
connection with the former — are bounded, very 
much as the ends of that history in miniature, the 
vari-colored spectrum, are bounded, by the nature, 
which is of course the sovereignty, of the observing 
self. 

Now, at the present time a new idea of the self, or 



APPENDIX. 229 

rather a new self, is threatening the reigning sovereign. 
Psychologists, for example, are already at a real vari- 
ance with the long-standing separation of feeling, 
whether of body or of soul, and reason ; and the 
historians of antiquity, as if wholly in sympathy with 
psychology, are no longer satisfied with a formal 
paragraph or two, or even with a formal chapter or 
two, on the emotional, sensuous, nature-enslaved, 
pantheistic life of the Orient ; and, politically, the 
Eastern Question is one of the most living questions 
of the day. 1 

But a change of sovereignty at any time must intro- 
duce, in company with the new self, also new views 
of life and death, of immortality and mortality. 
Thus, at the present time, to bring body and soul 
into a real or positive relation, to make the soul not 
only in but also of the body, to find mind essential to 
both soul and body, is very plainly to alter radi- 
cally the meaning of the antithesis between the here 
and the hereafter. So, for a time abandoning the 
more general standpoint with which we have begun, 
let us turn specifically to this antithesis and its more 
immediate incidents. What has its meaning been, 
and what is its meaning getting to be? 

1 To hint, as here, that the psychological question of the 
relation of emotion, sensuous or spiritual, to reason is really a 
phase of the Eastern Question, may seem to some very far- 
fetched indeed ; but the past history of psychology in its relation 
to politics is the only justification that I need for this merely 
apparent absurdity. 



230 APPENDIX. 



II. 



Plato's demonstration of the soul's immortality 
very well represents the idea of life and death that has 
prevailed. In this demonstration Plato at once epito- 
mized the fall of his own native Greece, and gave report 
of the rise of conquering Rome. Thus he said : The 
composite or divisible dies, but the simple or indi- 
visible lives ;. and, as if at a stroke, for which the 
changes of history had been preparing for six centu- 
ries or more, he therein made soul and body two, not 
one, and mind, external to either, the arbitrary law of 
the body and the empty, unsubstantial form of the 
soul ; and so even invited Rome to the conquest of 
Greece. 

That Plato's mortal body and immortal soul and 
external or abstract mind are those of current belief 
must be apparent to all, and that they have been the 
foundations of the still surviving condition of Roman- 
ism is a matter of well-known history. An infallible 
or irresponsible reason, an irrational faith, and a law- 
less body, — these are at once the widely current pre- 
suppositions of social life and the working hypotheses 
of historical record. We still live, so this means, a 
life that is external both to its conditions and to its 
results; we live even now in another world, wholly 
apart from this ; and accordingly another world, an 
hereafter that has no positive relation to the here, that 
is merely added on from without, is not perhaps our 



APPENDIX. 23 1 

only goal, but is at least commonly supposed to be 
our only spiritual goal. In this world, because it is 
composite, its parts being only formally and so at best 
only temporally related, we are dead or at least dying. 
Even recent Biology, as if under the spell of Platonism, 
has made the life of an organism external to its inci- 
dents, persistently treating the physical environment 
as essentially inorganic. 

But, as all are aware, more than eighteen centuries 
ago Christianity came as a protest against Plato's 
standpoint. Apart from its theological terms, it was 
a doctrine of life on earth, of the spiritual as not only 
in but also of the physical, of the simple and immortal 
as in some real way not opposed to the physical and 
mortal, of this world and the other world as not two 
but one. " Now is the accepted time ; now is the 
day of salvation." " Inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto one of these, my brethren, even these least, ye 
have done it unto me." "I am the way, the truth, 
and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by 
me." 

As for Romanism, 1 this has rested in the literal 
Christ, not in the spiritual ; in the deified man, not in 
the God. Moreover, if one may so speak, the mis- 
take of history, religious or political or intellectual, 
has been the mistake of literalism. Whatever it may 
have meant to Plato or to Rome, to Christianity 

1 It must be kept in mind that by Romanism is always 
meant here an all-pervading social condition, not any visible 
institution. As just now hinted, even Biology has entertained 
Romanism or Platonism. 



232 APPENDIX. 

denial of the world did not mean a spiritual isolation. 
Christianity was a fulfilment, and it was so presented 
by its Prophet. The Christian negation of the com- 
posite, of the mortal body, intended something else 
than assertion of a separate world for the simple and 
immortal, and Christianity, in the face of centuries of 
resistance and unappreciative interpretation has strug- 
gled to make this something else explicit. But what 
else? Why, nothing more nor less than that the 
physical itself is not composite, not a thing of exter- 
nally or only formally related parts, not dead nor 
even dying, but organic and so always living ; and 
into this more truly Christian idea of life, into the ful- 
filling Christianity, as if an inheritance from long ago, 
we are entering to-day. Soul as the substantial reality, 
the fulfilling life of the body, or life as responsible to 
its incidents, or body as organic, is the rising sover- 
eign of the new dynasty. 



III. 



I pass by the evidences of the change in social and 
political life and those even in the doctrines of pres- 
ent-day ethics and theology. I refrain, too, from any 
special mention of the more recent doctrines in psy- 
chology of emotion, of knowledge, or of will. I go 
directly to the physical sciences for the witness, which 
they bear, that matter, the physical, can no longer be 
conceived as lifeless, — that is, as composed of ele- 
ments, — but must be recognized as alive and organic. 



APPENDIX. 233 

Thus, Chemistry has indeed entertained for a long time 
the doctrine of a conserved matter in connection with 
its doctrine of atoms, and until comparatively recent 
times a conserved matter has been rather a negative 
than a positive idea, standing for the simple as non- 
composite, and only serving as a corrective, although 
an unappreciated corrective, of the retained standpoint 
of atomism ; but to-day Chemistry has completely 
subordinated mere elemental composition to an 
organizing or interrelating process and has so ar- 
rived at, or all but arrived at, a truly positive mean- 
ing for matter as conserved and indivisible. What 
else, for example, but that matter is literally, actually, 
essentially organic can be meant by the thorough- 
going application of mathematics to chemical phe- 
nomena, or by the notion of an evolutional order in 
the different elements? The space and the time in 
which mathematics thinks are not composite but 
indivisible, or at once relational and dynamic, — that is 
to say, organic, — and an evolutional order must mean, 
among other things, that quality and substance are 
inseparable. To relate atoms in any way is to destroy 
their atomic or elemental character. Chemistry, 
then, as mathematical and evolutional, is dividing its 
own atom — out of existence. 

And Physics, instead of any longer identifying force 
with matter in motion, as if matter and motion were 
altogether separate realities, has virtually gotten rid 
of its dualism, or, to be still more specific, instead of 
depending on the trinity of ( 1 ) a spaceless and time- 
less or indivisible medium, motionless and inert, 



234 APPENDIX. 

(2) a dividing vibration in a divisible space and 
time, which has been saved from its own absurdity 
only by the indivisible medium, and (3) a physical 
force or quality external alike to the substantiating 
medium and the mediating vibration, has now a con- 
ception of quality or force that — not to mention 
other results — makes the notion of an abstract 
merely underlying medium untenable. As a mathe- 
matical and evolutional chemistry no longer needs 
a conserved matter, so a physics, that has also turned 
mathematical and that has no doctrine so important 
as that of the mutability of forces, can do without the 
indivisible impenetrable medium. Not only are the 
physical qualities, which have all been found to be 
incidents, although external incidents, of vibrations 
of one sort or another, recognized as reducible to one, 
but also in proportion as the vibrations are short and 
rapid and lateral the quality generated is supposed to 
be an important condition of organic life. In short, 
the ultimate physical quality, as it were the limit, 
wherein medium and vibration and quality are finally 
identified, must be life itself. 

What wonder, then, that Biology is saying in so 
many ways that Physics and particularly Chemistry 
must be appealed to for light upon the central biolo- 
gical problems. Like the other world, or the im- 
mortal soul of Plato, Chemistry's conserved matter 
and Physics' underlying medium have been but gods 
worshipped in ignorance, indirections or abstrac- 
tions for the persistent fact of organic life. Biol- 
ogy, however, as might be expected, and as has been 



APPENDIX. 23 5 

remarked already, has not been without its own Pla- 
tonism. Particularly in its "vital unit," an indefinitely 
small part, — to-day smaller even than the discovered 
cell, and for that matter always smaller than any 
known part, — Biology has fallen into the error of 
a pure lifeless abstraction for the living and organic ; 
and the inorganic environment, already referred to, 
also shows how the science of life has been asleep to 
its own presuppositions. Simply, if environment be 
related to life, it must itself be organic — indeed, is 
not every organism itself a natural part of its own so- 
called environment? — and, to return to the other 
point, if really alive, the " vital unit " can hardly be 
a thing for microscopic discovery. The simple- 
minded dogma that the " vital unit " is immortal 
is as delightful a bit of supernaturalism as recent 
times have afforded. As a paradox, however, true 
in spite of itself, it precipitates the new era. The 
divinity of the man Christ was the same paradox, 
as it came to human experience centuries ago. Not 
an organism, as some specific portion of matter, large 
or small, but the organic is immortal. 

So, in summary, whatever immortality has been 
ascribed to an immaterial soul or to a conserved 
matter, to a "vital unit" or to an underlying me- 
dium, belongs to the living and organic, for which 
these several immortals — I was tempted to entitle 
this study " With the Immortals " — have been sheer 
indirections. 1 In the sense of the material as com- 

1 Sometimes called working hypotheses, or Hiilfsbegriffe, 
which they certainly are. 



236 APPENDIX. 

posite, the soul, the immortal self, is indeed immate- 
rial ; but in reality the material is not composite but 
organic, so that the soul can be said to be at once 
material and immortal. The composite may decom- 
pose, and decomposition is death, but the organic 
never dies. 



IV. 



But what, asks somebody, is to become of personal 
or individual immortality ? Well, that certainly is not 
lost here, but is assured, as never before. An im- 
material soul is not now at all necessary to a belief in 
individual immortality, unless, forsooth, in the very 
face of Christianity and in the very face of the latest 
science, one insist that individuals are atoms or are, 
at least as manifested in this world's time and space, 
only their visible bodies. Individuality or personality 
is relationship as something actual and substantial, 
and relationship is never lost. The very fulfilment or 
substantiation of a relationship involves a separation 
of the individual from anything like a confining body. 
Organic life involves change, decay, a certain kind of 
death ; but the organic relations, that make or that are 
individuals, survive even the most radical changes. 1 
The organic, then, is a constant triumph over death, 
and above all over the death of individuals. Also — 
and this should be reflected upon, as showing so posi- 

1 This, obviously enough, is as true in the phenomena of 
Chemistry and Physics and Biology as it is true in those of 
human society. 



APPENDIX. 237 

tively what individuality is — it is a constant triumph 
over birth. Individuals neither die nor come into 
being. 

To any one who still recognizes no criterion of in- 
dividuality but that of mere physical or spatial and tem- 
poral isolation, the foregoing will be only so many 
empty words, but the true Christian out of his own 
experience can interpret my meaning. In which 
sense was Christ an individual? If in that of physi- 
cal isolation, he certainly was not immaculately con- 
ceived and he certainly did not rise from the dead, 
but if in that of organic relationship he was not born 
as are men and he lives now and is the sovereign of 
the present life. Too many that call themselves Chris- 
tians forget the birth and the resurrection, or, if not 
forgetting, only parody them into a physical appear- 
ance and reappearance nearly two thousand years ago. 
Science, always getting its habit of mind from religion, 
has made a parody of them too. 

So now we can conclude, summarily, that the an- 
tithesis between the here and the hereafter is not, at 
least for the now rising dynasty, between this world 
and another or between the present and an wholly 
separate future, but between two perfectly real and 
contemporaneous aspects of the world that now is. 
Does the eternity, into which at what is called death 
we are said to pass, begin after the life here is 
ended? By no means. Eternity now is, and is, 
not in the sense of a time which can find for itself 
no content in the present life, but in that of a time 
whose content is the present life. "The Kingdom 



238 APPENDIX. 

of Heaven is at hand." At what we call death we 
do not leave this earth, but enter into it. Our death 
is our life in it ; not our burial, but our resurrection. 
How can that which was never born of woman 
die? 



V. 



To some, perhaps to very many, the view of im- 
mortality here outlined will seem to be (1) the doc- 
trine of Metempsychosis, or (2) only the Positivistic 
doctrine of a death- surviving " influence," or (3) 
what is known most commonly as Spiritualism. No 
one of these interpretations, however, is at all ade- 
quate, since all show a virtual return to the un- 
christian notion of the individual as determined by 
an isolated body, and so to the separation of soul 
from body or of quality, which is " influence," both 
from that which has it and from that which gener- 
ates it. 

The view here outlined is not Metempsychosis 
nor Positivism nor Spiritualism, but it is the inner 
truth of all these partial views. Thus, it does free 
the soul from a confining body, and teach that in- 
fluence is immortal, and even that the dead communi- 
cate with the living ; but it says that the freedom, 
which is really from only when also in the body, 
is as real before death as after, and that both per- 
sonality and " influence " survive, the two being 
one. Spiritualism and Positivism are mutually comple- 



APPENDIX. 239 

mentary and corrective, the former very properly 
insisting that the surviving influence is of a real 
substantial individual, and the latter that the sur- 
viving individual is not an immaterial spirit, the 
soul's substance being the organic, not the imma- 
terial ; and Metempsychosis, in which is evident a 
formal conciliation of Positivism and Spiritualism, 
is right in keeping the hereafter here, but wrong 
in retaining the merely physical criterion of indi- 
viduality. The soul's transmigration is not a passage 
from one body to another, but, so far as it can be 
physically recounted, the organic union of two in a 
third. 1 

Even Plato taught Metempsychosis at one time 
in his life, — at the time when he was interested in 
transporting Greek life to Sicily, where he hoped 
to establish the ideal state ; but afterwards he came 
to see that the future home of the Greek was not in 
another wholly separate body, and Rome came finally, 
as if the third body, including and so relating Greece 
and Plato's Sicily. Moreover, that Rome was the 
realization of the ideal Greek state is one of the 
commonplaces of history. Significantly enough, too, 
it appears that Metempsychosis was taught long 
before Plato's time, when the Greek communities 
in Asia Minor and on the farther islands of the 
yEgean Sea were sending out colonies or themselves 
moving bodily to the west, so that Plato's ideal was 

1 Compare the account of motion as not a passing from one 
point to another, but a relating of two separate points to a 
third. The infinitesimal of pure mechanics has made it this. 



240 APPENDIX. 

no visionary one. The very migration that he 
thought of had already taken place, and Rome 
came in evidence of it. In a word, then, Greece 
was already in the west before she finally migrated 
thither; or, when she finally migrated thither, she 
did not leave her own home. 



VI. 



And, finally, again to venture a remark or two 
upon the political significance of the new — or is it 
really only the "prehistoric"? — view of life and 
death, 1 other-worldliness or supernaturalism is evi- 
dently a necessary standpoint, when the life of any 
part, large or small, is isolated from any other part of 
the whole sphere of life. Isolation of the Greek from 
the Barbarian led finally to Plato's Athens, where the 
Greek found himself separated even from himself, 
and the isolation of Christendom from the uncivilized 
and unchristian parts of the earth is responsible for 
our modern Platonism. Belief in another world, how- 
ever, is the natural corrective of partiality in this, the 
other world believed in being only the unity of this, 
so that, as was suggested at the beginning, our present- 
day supernaturalism and the closed life of the Orient 
are but two phases of one experience, and with the 
decline of supernaturalism will come, is coming, the 
opening of the Orient. Has not all Christendom 

1 The " prehistoric " life and death have always been those 
of a " Golden Age." 



APPENDIX. 



241 



owed its belief in immortality to the unchristian 
Orient ? Strange indeed are the paradoxes of history ! 
East and West, as if soul and body, or faith and 
reason, or nature and man, or immortality and mortal- 
ity, are not two but one ; and in the evidence of their 
unity we find the dawn of the new dynasty, of the Vy/ 

old, the prehistoric Christianity. 



1 6 



INDEX. 



INDEX. 



Note. — This Index is for the most part rather topical than verbal. The 
literal words will not always be found on the pages referred to. Also this 
Index is rather selective than exhaustive. 



Abiogenesis, 56. 

Accuracy, dependent on interest, 
127. 

Activity, dependent on relation- 
ship, 43 ; reactive or interactive, 
197; as not serial, 212. 

Adjustment, original, S4, 159, 220; 
derived by chance, 136. 

Afferent Theory, 163, 210. 

After-image, 1S8. 

Anaxagoras, his view of world and 
mind, 47. 

Animals, conscious and thinking, 
19 ; social to men, 91 ; views 
about, in Comparative Psychol- 
ogy, 163. 

Anthropomorphism, 59. 

Architecture, and space-perception, 
78. 

Aristotle, 16, 115. 

Association, 82, 174. 

Athletics, placeof,in education, 124. 

Attention, theories of, 173. 

Baldwin, 187. 

Berenson, 66 n. 

Biology, 84, 136, 142, 231, 234. 

Body, as intelligent, 59; as instru- 
ment of adjustment, 60; its 
functions interchangeable, 62 ; 
feeling in, 16S; and soul, 129, 
229. 



Causation, 57, 198. 

Change, general nature of, 48 ; 
necessary to relationship, 52 : as 
reproduction, restoration, or 
substitution, 64. 

Chemistry, 47, 121, 233. 

Child, and growth of space-percep- 
tion, 81. 

Christ, 107, 109, 135, 231, 235, 

2 37- 

Christian Science, 73. 

Christianity, 107, 130, 220, 231, 
241. 

City, and country, in social evolu- 
tion, 190. 

Classification, 36, 100, 138. 

Coexistence, and sequence, 153. 

Composition, inner meaning of, 
40; and simplicity, 131, 230; 
and mortality, 141, 230. 

Compulsion, in education, 123, 

125, 173- 

Conception, as dynamic, 117. 

Conception, Immaculate, 237-8. 

Consciousness, general nature of, 
17, 65, 69, 89, 112, 163 ; essen- 
tially social, 23, 89 ; individual, 
26 ; subject to Law of Relativity, 
66; related to life and thought, 
17-21 ; organs of, not limited, 
68, 105 ; as never epiphenomenal, 
162. 



246 



INDEX. 



Country, and city, in social evolu- 
tion, 190. 
Creationism, 57, 199, 203, 214. 

Decomposition, 132, 230. 

Descartes, 162. 

Determinism, 219. 

Dewey, 177 n. 

Dualism, and objectivity, 29; in 
science, 56, 136, 140; vs. Mo- 
nism, 158 ; in theory of emotion, 
167, of attention, 173, of action, 
198, of will, 213, of effort, 210, 
of immortality, 139, 230; in 
education, 105, 123-6. 

Education, illustrations from, 
101, 105, 123-129, 169, 173- 

Effort, 210. 

Emotion, and interest, 167; 
theories of, 170. 

Entelechy, 16. 

Environment, as organic, 54; its 
living mediation, 72; natural 
and social, 89, 11S; as linguis- 
tic, 27, 92, 179; as alien, 136; 
as originally personal, 221. 

Epistemology, 47 n., 114. 

Evolution, science of, as still su- 
pernaturalistic, 136; and time, 
149, 153 ; social, five stages of, 
193 ; vs. Creationism, 203. 

Expression, symbolic, and right- 
handedness, 187. 

Extension, relation of, to intension, 
36. 

Faculties, thought and sensa- 
tion, 104; Monistic doctrine of, 
161. 

Fechner, 67. 

Feeling, and interest, 167; theories 
of, 170. 

Force, as nature of space, yy ; and 
idea, 120 ; in relation to space 



and time, 156 ; a recent idea of, 
2 33- 

Formalism, 97-106; defined, 100; 
in history, 107-110; in educa- 
tion, 123-126; vs. Dynamic 
Idealism, 158; (in theory of 
space, 76, of time, 147.) 

Freedom, and law, 81, 115 ; and 
will, 200, 209. 

Functions, of body, interchange- 
able, 62. 

Greeks, philosophy of, 16, 45, 49, 
130, 192, 230, 239. 

Habit, original, 84; relation of, 

to impulse and instinct, 203-8. 
Hegel, 1 68. 

History, and time, 153. 
Homer, 171. 
Homoeomeries, 46-7. 

Ideas, as forms, 97; as forces, 113; 

as not innate, 161. 
Immaculate Conception, 237 
Immortality, 51, 139, 155, 159. 227. 
Impulse, relation of, to instinct 

and habit, 203-8. 
Incarnate Word, 107, 221. 
Indeterminism, 219. 
Individuality, 36, 164, 207, 236. 
Inheritance, 39, 137, 160. 
Innervation Theory, 163, 210. 
Inorganic, concept of, criticised, 

54- 
Instinct, relation to impulse and 

habit, 203-S. 
Intelligence, and intelligibility, 

45 ; as essential to the body, 59; 

and language, 178-197. 
Intelligibility, 41-45. 
Intension, and extension, 36. 
Intuitionalism, 76. 

James, 176, 211. 



INDEX. 



247 



Kant, 190 n. 

Knowledge, for knowledge's sake, 
12, 101, 124. 

Language, true function of, 27; 
as general as environment, 27, 
92, 179 ; dead, in education, 
103, 124; and thought, 178; as 
after-image, iSS; meaning of 
sciences of, 1S0; dependence of, 
on control, 1S2 ; and right- 
handedness, 187 ; three special 
functions of, 1S9; illustrated in 
social evolution, 190. 

Life, conscious and rational, 17-21, 
52 ; not created, 56-7 ; universal, 
52, 54, 135 ; immortal, 51, 139, 
159, 227. 

Localization, of sensation, 71, 
126 ; of self, 70, 160. 

Locke, 162. 

Materialism, 73, 219. 

Mathematics, 37, 47 n., 80, 1 54 , 233. 

Matter, inorganic, 54 ; as not ab- 
stract, 73; as conserved, 140, 
233 ; as one with mind, 159 ; as 
organic, 56, 232 ; as immortal, 
Ho, 233. 

Measurement, and space-percep- 
tion, 79. 

Mechanicalism, 61. 

Medium, abstract, 103,124,162,233. 

Memory, 124, 156 n. 

Metaphysics, and Psychology, vi. 

Metempsychosis, 143, 23S. 

Mind, intrinsic to all things, 45, 
99, 159 ; as seen by physical 
science, 121. 

Mixture, infinite, as account of 
relationship, 46. 

Monism, and objectivity, 21-29 ; 
vs. Dualism, 15S ; in science, 
57, 138 ; in theory of emotion, 
171, of attention, 174, of asso- 
ciation, 174, of action, 201, of 



Impulse, instinct, and habit, 204 ; 

in religion, 220. 
Monte Carlo, 217, 21S. 
Motion, relativity of, 49; Greek 

paradoxes of, 49 ; and space, 

78, 156 ; as a relating of points, 

239 n. 
Motive, and stimulus, 172, 201. 

Negation, value of, in thought, 
20, 54 ; fatality of, in volition, 213. 
Number, meaning of, 36. 

Object, of consciousness, 21-31; 
as social institution, 22-6, 89 ; 
as language, 27, 92 ; organic re- 
lation of, to subject, 58, 83, 117; 
its living mediation, 72. 

Objectivity, spatial, rational, and 
moral, 29-30 ; spatial, 75 ; ra- 
tional, 97 ; spiritual, 197 ; and 
control, 1 S3. 

Organic, as all-inclusive, 54 ; in- 
telligence of, 59 ; substantially 
relational, 54 ; as involving sep- 
aration of subject and object, 
54— S ; as immortal, 142, 232 ; as 
triumph over both death and 
birth, 236-7. 

Organs, of body, never acting in 
isolation, 64 ; of sense, unlim- 
ited in number, 6S ; of conduct 
and thought, 65, 1S6 ; periphe- 
ral, SS. 

Orient, 229, 240. 

Perception, 88, 115. 
Peripheral organs, 88. 
Personification, 221. 
Physics, 47, 121, 233. 
Plants, as conscious, 19. 
Plato, 130, 192, 230, 239. 
Positivism, 238. 
Practice, and theory, 127. 
Present, specious, 149. 
Psychology, and metaphysics, vi.; 



248 



INDEX. 



defined, 11-17 ; socialistic, not 

individualistic, 25. 

Qualities, not external to things, 
38 ; common in association, 174. 

Reading, psychology of, 184. 

Recapitulation, biological, 154; in 
Mathematics, 155. 

Relationism, 49, S7, 143, 147, 162, 
178; in a summary, 158. 

Relations, substantial, 41 ; imply- 
ing activity, 43 ; essential to the 
organic, 54 ; basis of intelligibil- 
ity and intelligence, 41 ; essence 
of space, 77 ; immortal, 142, 232. 

Relativity, Law of, 66, 114, 161, 

183. 

Religion, the supreme education, 
109; and Dualism, 140; in so- 
cial evolution, 194 ; as a per- 
sonal relationship to nature, 221. 

Reproduction, 64. 

Restoration, after injury, 63. 

Resurrection, 237. 

Retention, 156 n. 

Right-handedness, 186, 187 n. ; in 
social evolution, 192. 

Romanes, 18. 

SCHLEIERMACHER, 102, III. 

Schopenhauer, 167. 

Science, defined, 12 ; supernat- 
uralism in, 136 ; Christian, 73 ; 
accuracy of, 127 ; illustrations 
from, 39, 56, 62, 84, 103, 120, 
136, 142, 154, 175. 

Self, parts of, 129. 

Self-consciousness, 90, 163. 

Sensation, 68 ; localization of, 71, 
126 ; formal, 47 ; not a separate 
faculty, 104, 161 ; an innate 
idea, 162; dynamic, 113. 

Sensationalism, 76. 

Sense-organs, see Organs. 

Sequence, and coexistence, 153. 

Society, organism, 164; thinking, 



190-4; classes in, 192; evolu- 
tion of, in five stages, 193. 

Solar system, motion of, 50. 

Soul, defined, 15-17; and body, 
129, 229 ; emotion of, 168 ; 
transmigration of, 143, 238 ; 
immortality of, 139, 159, 236. 

Space, 76; and time, 154, 233; 
and motion, 78, 156. 

Spinoza, 85. 

Spiritualism, 238. 

Stimulus, and motive, 172, 201. 

Subject, organic relation of, to 
object, 58, 82, 117. 

Substitution, after injury, 63. 

Summaries, 28, 47, 87, 106, 158, 

2 37- 
Supernaturalism, 136, 219, 235. 

Theory, and practice, 127. 

Thing, individual, as a relation, 35. 

Thinker, duty of, 20, 102. 

Thought, relation of, to life and 
consciousness, 17-21; as not 
separate from sensation, 161 ; 
and language, 1 78 ; as rehearsal 
or activity to self, 181 ; special 
organs of, 65, 186. 

Time, not formal, 147 ; and evo- 
lution, 149; paradoxes of, 149; 
and space, 154. 

Transmigration, of the soul, 143, 
238. 

Travel, two views of, 48. 

Unit, vital, immortality of, 142 ; 

as only an abstraction, 235. 
University, and technical schools, 

127. 

Vital Unit, immortality of, 142; 
as only an abstraction, 235. 

Weber, 67. 

Will, 209; and deed, 214; media- 

tive, not creative, 216, 220. 
Word Incarnate, 107, 221. 



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